


Walter Tapley's Lament

by OGSalli



Category: Discussion of sex - Fandom, General adult, Mature - Fandom
Genre: Escort, Gen, New York City, No Sex Scenes, mature content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-23
Updated: 2020-06-23
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:27:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 43,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24876145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OGSalli/pseuds/OGSalli
Summary: A widowed 66-year-old lawyer goes to Manhattan to spend the weekend with a high-priced “escort,” but not for the reason you think. All he wants is to talk, “get some clarity,” about What It All Means: love, sex, work, and fine dining. What also comes up: Nathan’s hot dogs, the Sexual Revolution (and What Went Wrong), Cro-Magnon dating, the Staten Island ferry, sex legislation, Katz’s Deli, the history of Washington Square Park, battered women’s shelters, what’s wrong with pornography (and what’s right), Peekytoe crabs, Bob Dylan and Suzie Rotolo’s album cover, Ferris wheels, the Promised Land, and where Moses died. Walter Tapley doesn’t want to just talk; he wants to listen, too, and Karen Preston’s thoughts and opinions are crucial. There’s no sex scenes, just conversation and a lot of humor.





	Walter Tapley's Lament

**Walter Tapley's Lament**

**Friday** **Evening**

When Walter Tapley heard the quiet knock on the door of his suite he picked up the TV remote and turned off the evening news. He crossed the room and opened the door, and there she was, everything he had hoped for, and more.

She was quietly gorgeous in an understated way, as beautiful as her photo on the Web site indicated, and as pretty in real life as she was in the other three photos the agency had e-mailed to him during the negotiations. She was one of those women who wore her good looks casually, not like a fashion model whose work ethic it was to be gorgeous. Nor did her beauty depend upon cosmetics: She gave off a healthy, natural glow, with overtones of “intelligent” and “fun.” She seemed not to know she could take your breath away, and she would be just as gorgeous first thing in the morning, before she put her “face” on. Mussed, rumpled, and tousled with the sleepies still in her eyes, she’d still be sexy and adorable.

When you paid top dollar for highest quality, she was what you got.

“This is Room 528, so I bet you’re Mr. Tapley,” she smiled, offering her hand to shake like she was the new junior associate in the litigation section, introducing herself at the bar association welcome mixer. “It’s a pleasure meeting you.”

He liked the timber of her voice, the way she made eye contact. It made him feel for a moment that it really _was_ a pleasure for her, not just another assignation. He liked the grip of her handshake, firm and confident. Her arms were bare and tanned and her biceps were cut; he bet she played tennis. She wore low heels and a simple black cocktail dress with a round neckline, what the fashion magazines might call a “frock,” about fifteen hundred dollars’ worth. She wore a simple gold chain necklace, very small links, with a small gold charm of some sort, modest but still tastefully expensive, and matching, nearly invisible earrings. Brown hair streaked with lots of blond, cut shaggy-short. Large brown eyes, good bones in the face. A nice, kissable mouth. Trim figure, small breasts the way he liked them, good, tanned legs that would look fabulous with white tennis sneakers or ice skates. The glow of self-confident athleticism. She was younger than his daughter, but a few years older than his oldest granddaughter. Her internet profile claimed she was 26.

“Hi, come in. Call me Walter.”

“Hi, Walter. I’m Karen Preston.” She knew he knew her name, whether it was real or not, and he knew she knew, one of those things. She had a way of taking the awkwardness out of it.

She came past him and walked confidently into the hotel suite, not masking the fact that she was looking around, curious, inspecting, assessing. “This is very lovely,” she said.

“Thank you. Yes, they do a very nice job here,” he said. It wasn’t the kind of hotel room you negotiated on Priceline. “I started staying at this hotel the first time I came to New York on business, oh, thirty-some years ago, long before you were born. They know me and I know them. The staff are almost like family, after all these years.”

“So you stay here often on business? You’re a lawyer, I understand.”

“Yes, that’s right, but I’m not on business this trip, just pleasure. Can I get you a drink? Please, sit down.” He gestured toward a comfortable chair near the room’s mini-bar set-up. “Let’s see, we have white wine, red wine, scotch, bourbon, vodka, gin, various beer, sodas, and mixers in the mini-fridge. Anything your heart desires.”

“I’ll have what you’re having.”

“Well, in that case, we’re having … let’s see.” He picked up one of the wine bottles on the credenza and looked at the label. “This one’s a malbec. Too early in the evening for a malbec, don’t you think? And pretty dry, would be my guess.” He picked up another bottle and read the label. “This one’s a chardonnay, a nice Napa Valley. We could do that, but it would be boring and predictable.”

“We don’t want to be boring and predictable,” she grinned.

“Certainly not. This last one is … oh, good. They got me a good German Riesling, a _spätlese_ , from … someplace along the Mosel. They know I like German wines.”

“Not boring, not predictable. Let’s do that one.”

He liked that she would express an opinion. “The Riesling it is,” he said, using a tool from the bar to cut the foil, and a small but efficient cork-puller. There were wine glasses on the bar and he poured her one and handed the glass to her. He noted that she took it by the stem, not by the bowl, and swirled it, oxygenating it. She held it up to the light coming from the window and watched how the swirls ran down the inside of the glass.

“Nice color,” she said. “Good legs.”

He poured his and held it up to confirm. “Yes.” He swirled his and watched as she brought her glass to her nose, bent over it slightly, and inhaled deeply. This was a girl who knew her wine. She looked up at him, her brows knit in concentration. “Lemons … and maybe … I’m not sure. Something in the citrus family.”

He inhaled the fumes from his glass. “Yes. I’m getting … could it be pineapple?”

She inhaled deeply, swirled, took her first sip. “Mmmmmm,” she said. “Very nice. Crisp, too. Not too floral, not too sweet. And a nice finish.”

He knew then that he could take her anywhere. Paris. London. Monaco. Hong Kong. A Hollywood premiere. Lincoln Center. The MOMA. A small club with a good jazz ensemble. She wasn’t arm candy, she was the whole M&M factory.

He sat down on the small love seat across from her chair. “I assume the escort agency told you I have some … well … unusual requests we’ll need to negotiate,” he began. “Plus options and bonuses and so forth. Extra services.”

“Yes, Caroline told me that,” she said. Caroline was her madam. “I’m sure we can work something out.”

Walter smiled. “What I want is something you may never have done before, not professionally, anyway.”

Oh, fuck, she thought. I was just starting to like this guy. I hope he’s not a freak.

* * *

She tried to smile, and Walter liked that she put some effort into it. But he had been reading people while they danced the negotiation jitterbug for four decades, and he was very good at it. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said, “that little flash of panic across your face, but that’s not it at all. Nothing kinky. In a way, it isn’t even about sex, though in another way of course it is. But let me explain that later. First, me being a lawyer, I’d like to go over the terms and conditions, and the fee structure. Would you like some more wine?”

“Sure,” she said, holding out her glass. “Going over the fee schedule has always been my favorite part of a date, you smooth-talker, you.”

He poured her more wine, laughing and pleased with her sass, and that she took risks. That’s what he wanted, a risk-taker. “I can tell already we’re going to get along fine.” He had wanted to add, “You remind me of my daughter,” but he knew you never tell a woman she reminded you of someone else.

He put the bottle back on the bar, went into the bedroom and came back with his suit coat, which he laid carefully on the arm of the love seat after removing an envelope from the inside pocket. He handed her the envelope and sat back down across from her.

“As agreed with Caroline, that’s your fee for this evening, twenty-five hundred, cash, plus one thousand dollars as a non-refundable retainer for tomorrow and Sunday. If everything goes well this evening, and we are mutually agreed, we’ll spend the whole weekend together, and you’ll receive four thousand for each day and evening, minus the retainer. If one of us decides not to continue past tonight, you still get to keep that retainer because I've prevented you from booking other clients for two days and partial compensation for loss of income, and we say goodbye and it’s been nice meeting you. If we do spend the weekend together, then there may also be a performance bonus payable Sunday evening. Is that your understanding as well?”

She took a sip of her wine as she pretended to think it over. “You left out something.”

“Oh? What’s that?”

“Room and board.”

Walter laughed. “Yes, you’re quite right! Room and board. Of course. I shall be glad to pay for your victuals and livery, and any incidental expenses.”

It was her turn to laugh. “Victuals. I haven’t heard that word in years. My granddad used to say it. Sometimes he called it vittles.” She caught herself, realizing that perhaps she had just equated him with her grandfather. It was not a good idea to bring up the difference in their ages to a man willing to pay ten or twelve grand to fuck your brains out over two-and-a-half days, if he'd remembered to bring his Cialis.

“Speaking of which, I don't know about you, but I'm getting hungry,” he said. “What say we go find some of those vittles, and discuss the rest of our arrangement then?”

“Sounds great,” she said, rising and putting her wine glass on the bar. She folded in half the envelope he'd given her without opening it, and put it in her tiny purse while he put on his suit jacket.

“Ready?”

“Just a sec,” she said, reaching and adjusting his tie. “There.”

He doubted his tie was that askew; in fact, he knew it wasn't. But it was a small, intimate gesture, something almost … wifely. Proprietary. This is my man; I want him to look good. And not counting the handshake it was the first physical touching. He liked it, her hand whispering across his chest, as she knew he would.

* * *

When they came through the revolving door Walter nodded to the doorman, who went to the curb to flag them a taxi. It was a New York evening in early autumn, the air still warm, reflections of the uptown skyscrapers golden with sunset. Rush hour was dying away, and the traffic noise was muted.

“Where would you like to go for dinner?” he asked her. “Is there a McDonald's or Burger King around here?”

She turned her head and stared at him, deadpan but amused, because she knew he knew she knew he knew she knew he was playing with her. “I love a big spender,” she said.

A cab arrived and they got in. He told the driver a number on 51st near 7th Avenue. It was only a few blocks away, and they soon pulled up in front of Chez Montmartre.

“Oh, my God, how did you get reservations?” she asked as he handed her out of the cab. “I've heard the waiting list is four or five months.”

“It is, but I called Jules last week to see if he could squeeze us in.”

“You know Jules?”

He just flicked his eyebrows and smiled as he held the door for her as they went in. Jules was Jules LeClos, one of the top-ranked chefs in New York, and the country. He was a celebrity chef; he'd cooked at the White House, published books, fed movie stars, and had his own TV show. Every New Yorker knew about “the Monty,” as the city had nicknamed his restaurant.

“Have you been here before?” he asked.

“Are you kidding? I get taken to some nice places, but girls in my profession usually don't go to places like this. How do they say it in government? This is above my pay grade.”

“Well, it was on my bucket list, and now I can cross it off.”

“Too bad I don't have a bucket list,” she said.

“You should start one,” Walter said, “and put this restaurant at the top of it, and then cross it off. You never know when your last day is going to be.”

The maitre'd seated them at a quiet table off to the side, where they could talk without fear of eavesdroppers, as Walter had requested when he'd made the reservation.

“Should we stick with wine or would you like a cocktail?” he asked her.

“Never mix, never worry,” she said, looking at her menu. “Are you going to order for me?”

“No. You're a big girl, now. You're capable of figuring out what you want.”

That made her grin. “Well, thank you for that. I don't ever show it, of course, but I'm always a little annoyed when the man presumes to order my dinner for me. I admit I've always been intimidated by menus that don't have prices, but even so, I’m not a child.”

“Mine doesn't have prices, either. Jules charges _prix fixe_ , you just pay by the head, no matter what you order. So go ahead, go crazy. Get the fries _and_ the onion rings.”

“I don't see the Big Mac,” she said, “so for the appetizer I think I'll have the scallop slivers with Mandarin puffs and scorched lemon in the mango vinaigrette. And for the main course I simply cannot resist the Peekytoe crab cake with the chili-lime emulsion and the tequila-infused guacamole.”

“Excellent choices,” the waiter said, not writing anything down. “Sir?”

“The carpaccio, and I think the Waygu beef filet. Is that Kobe or Omi, do you know? ”

“Chef prefers Kobe. How would you like that done?”

“Jules will know,” Walter said. “He’s the expert.”

The waiter cocked his eyebrow in approval, took their menus, and departed.

Walter took a sip of his wine and swung smoothly into his pitch. “I apologize for keeping you in suspense about the special conditions we need to discuss. I'm sure you're curious about them.”

“I'm comfortable with delayed gratification,” she smiled. She was leaning forward slightly so they could talk quietly and she could hear him clearly. He looked at the tanned skin at her neckline in the candlelight, and decided he'd never seen anything so flawless. He imagined kissing her there, and thought it would be like kissing velvet.

“So here is the very special and unusual thing that I'd like to ask of you over the next couple of days. Complete, total, unadulterated, unfiltered honesty, frankness and candor. What I want to do is have a conversation, and discuss a number of things I have on my mind. It's about sex, and men and women, and the things they do with each other. And I want to ask your opinion about those things, and I really want to hear your answers, no matter what they may be. What I'm saying is, I don't want any flattery, I don't want you to tell me what you think I might want to hear. In just the few minutes I've known you, you strike me as being pretty honest and straightforward, and I like that. Some of the questions and discussions are going to be a bit personal, about you, and the things you've done and experienced. But let me add quickly that while these things are highly personal and sexual, I'm not going to ask you where you live, how you got into the business, where you grew up, that kind of thing. I’m not going to ‘rescue’ you from your profession; I’m not one of those, either. I don't want to invade your personal privacy in any significant way, but on the other hand I really do want to know what you think about various sexually related things. What you like and don’t like, and why or how. What other people you know, your friends, what they think and do. That's the part I want you to be totally honest and frank about. Your experience and understanding of love and sex, and love-making. I don't especially want to know about your other clients, their names or who they were, per se, but sometimes you might want to relate an experience or something you've learned or done. I'm not asking you to talk dirty to me, but I am asking you to talk about fucking and sex and whatever comes up in as candid and honest a way as possible.

“So that's what I'm asking for. You don't have to give me your answer right away. I suggest we eat dinner and chat, relax and enjoy the meal, and then you can decide if you're willing to do this, and if not, well, it will still have been a wonderful evening for me with terrific companionship, and that will be that. Your honor, the prosecution rests.”

She looked down, swirling the wine in her glass. Finally she said, “Wow.”

“I've read that a lot of men who hire – who have liaisons like this – often spend the night talking rather than doing anything,” he continued, “and crying about their mothers, or their wives don't understand them, and all that. I'm not one of those guys. This isn't anything like that. It's just that I have a lot of questions, and I'm at a time in my life when I'd like some answers, that's all. I want some … clarity.”

Their appetizers arrived.

“Can you – would you – tell me a little bit about yourself?” she asked.

“Sure, that's more than reasonable. I'm 66 years old, and a widower. I have two sons and a daughter. One of my sons is gay; he and his partner live in Vancouver, Canada, and he's a set designer in the television and movie industry out there. My other son is a lawyer in my law firm, and my daughter is a college professor. They are both married, and between them I have five grandchildren, and my son in Vancouver has been talking with his partner about adopting. So that's my immediate family.

“I graduated from college in 1966 instead of 1967 because they let me skip fourth grade. I dodged the draft and Vietnam because I was seriously opposed to the war. I wasn't a peacenik or a hippy protester, I wasn't a pacifist, nothing like that. But I knew I'd have made a piss-poor soldier and I consider I served my country best by staying out of its army and preserving it from a lot of problems and foul-ups it didn't need. Other people in the army were fucking up left and right back then without me and they didn't need some smart-ass telling them all the time, hey, I told you so, and critiquing their performance. So instead I went to law school and then joined a law firm in Chicago. I specialized in those days in corporate law, I'm not a criminal lawyer or a trial lawyer. I was good at it, but to be perfectly honest it was very dull. Plus I was a child of the Sixties, you know, and I was pretty ambivalent about the corporate world anyway. I’m not even quite sure how I got into corporate; it’s really not ‘me’ at all. But sometimes shit happens, and you wake up one day wondering how you got where you are. I don’t know. I thought I could change things, change the world, working from inside the belly of the beast. There were a lot of us who thought like that, back then. I did a lot of repair work, fixing corporations after they’d done something stupid or venal, or both. Usually both. That was my specialty, helping ethically challenged CEOs clean up their acts. If I'd done the same thing in the army I'd have gotten court-martialed and dishonorably discharged. Instead, I was doing good work and making an unconscionable amount of money.”

He grinned and sipped his wine. “So there we were, a bunch of young, bored, hotshot, slightly subversive lawyers chaffing at the bit to make our marks in the world, to fix it, just as soon as the senior partners dropped dead and got out of our way, because they were part of the problem. But they weren't dying fast enough to suit us, so three of my impatient young colleagues and I quit and formed our own small law firm in the suburbs. We became what’s known as a boutique law firm. It turned out that although I was bored with corporation law, I seemed to have a previously undiscovered knack for management, organization, and leadership, and so I became what's called the managing partner. That means instead of practicing law, I mainly supervised other lawyers who practiced the legal stuff. And, if I may brag on myself a bit, I was pretty good, my colleagues were very good, and our law firm grew. We were successful, kicked some ass and took names, and pretty soon we got the reputation of being the go-to guys for a lot of specialized legal work. And before you know it we had 55 lawyers on staff with offices in four mid-western states plus small offices in New York, L.A., San Francisco and Washington. So that’s what I used to do, I herded cats, only these were more like jungle cats, not household tabbies. I was both Siegfried _and_ Roy. I interviewed and hired, I set up offices, talent-spotted and recruited, found clients, soothed and managed egos, schmoozed judges and politicians, put out fires and untangled clusterfucks, showed the flag. That's why I started coming to New York, to show my face at our office here, make some noise, generate some rainmaking, and do what managing partners do. And since I was the boss, I started up a small unit on the side that did a lot of pro bono work, working with legislators all over the country, getting laws about sex updated and modified, and most of the time, just plain rescinded. It was tricky, almost underground stuff. We worked way below the radar, because we had to, and that was the only way to get things done. A few years ago, rather than fully retire and go fishing, I kicked myself upstairs, and now I am the senior partner emeritus, which means I come in when I want to, go home when I feel like it, don’t even think about billable hours, and I wander around the corridors in a cardigan sweater and baggy pants held up with suspenders, being lovable and eccentric.”

She knew that was just hyperbole, that he wasn't really the baggy pants and cardigan type. He might be somebody's grandfather, but he didn't look like one. He looked fit and trim and nobody's fool.

A server took away their appetizer plates, set out new silverware, freshened their wine, and in a moment their main courses arrived.

“I need to tell you about my wife, Ellie. She died four years ago, from pancreatic cancer. We'd been married 38 years. She was a young paralegal, and I was a young lawyer, and four months after we met we were married and she was two months pregnant, although we didn't know it right then.” Walter laughed to himself. “The pre-marital sex was the best sex we ever had. It was hurried and fumbled, and secretive, and we didn't know very much about what we were doing. Not many people did back then; the so-called Sexual Revolution was just getting under way, and neither of us had been drafted into it. To this day, whenever I hear some preacher or some Conservative talk show prig start railing about the evils of pre-marital sex, about abstinence, and saving your virginity for your husband on your wedding night, I just want to laugh. How's your Peeky-whatever-it-is crab?”

“To die for. Would you like a bite?”

“Sure.”

She put some on her fork and fed it to him as he leaned forward. It was another intimate moment.

“Mmmm. That really is good. I’m from the Midwest; tell me what a Peekytoe crab is.”

“I read a piece about them a few years ago,” she said. “They come from Maine. They used to go by a couple of names, like sand crab and mud crab and rock crab, and they are fairly small. The lobstermen up there used to throw them out. Then one day some smart marketing guy changed their name to Peekytoe crab, just like they changed the name of that unwanted fish to Chilean sea bass, and then suddenly everybody wanted them and started paying these crazy high prices. Overnight they went from trash to delicacy. One of the big-shot New York chefs, one of your buddy Jules’ friends, maybe, started serving them and they became hot, hot, hot in all the trendy French restaurants. It's a crustacean Horatio Alger story, from rejects to haute cuisine delicacy. How’s your Kobe beef? I've heard about it but never had any.”

“It's very nice. Here, try some.” He cut a piece and put it on her plate, and watched her eat it.

“Oh, my God,” she said, “that's like a whole new species of meat. That's not even from the same animal as a cow, is it? Who would have thought the Japanese could build better steak than we do?”

“The melting temperature of its fat is lower than the temperature of the human body, so it literally does really melt in your mouth, it's not a metaphor. Sorry we didn't go get a couple of Whoppers?”

“You know, I could really get used to this lifestyle. Think your gay son and his partner might adopt me? I could eat in a place like this every night of life.”

“I think it would get old, after a while, just like anything else. Really rich food needs to be savored in small doses. The thing about a place like this is you have to make the experience rare enough that it is still special each and every time. Memorable, each time.”

“Oh, like sex!”

“Exactly,” he laughed.

“So, seriously, how often could a person eat at a place like this and still make it special each time, without becoming jaded?”

“That's a good question. Let me think about it, and I'll get back to you.”

“Oh, Walter, you're such a lawyer,” she said, pretending to be annoyed.

The waiter came and gave them dessert menus as a busboy cleared the table and got it ready for the next event. “I'll give you a few minutes,” the waiter said, finishing off the wine bottle into their glasses.

“I feel like such a hick from the sticks,” she said, reading the dessert menu. “I mean, I'm a pretty sophisticated city girl, you know? I have dined in some really excellent restaurants. But I don't think I've ever been in one this ... what? Elegant? Extravagant? I feel like I'm gawking at everything.”

“I hope you're not uncomfortable,” he said, genuinely concerned.

“No, no, I'm having a great time. This is just ... something new. But trust me, I could get used to being treated like this, real quick.”

“Well, just so you know, this isn't how I dine out very often, either. Generally speaking, I'm pretty much a meatloaf and pot roast kind of guy. In a way, I suppose this dinner is a metaphor for some of the things I want to talk about this weekend. Things I've always heard about but have never done before.”

She wasn't sure how to respond to that, but the waiter came to take their dessert order. She grimaced, and looked at Walter, biting her lip.

“This is so difficult! I'm already stuffed to the gills, but I want to order three of everything.”

“Are you a chocoholic?”

“I'm a woman, aren't I? Chocolate is built into our DNA. But I think I'm going to try to be good. If I get something, will you split it with me?” The sharing ritual, two teenagers in the malt shop, two straws, one ice cream soda.

“Sure. What would you like?”

“Ummmm. I don't know--”

“Would you like to experiment? Try something you've never had before?”

She looked at him, trying to figure out where this was going. This whole “never done before” metaphor thing.

“Do you trust me?”

She thought that over carefully. “Yes,” she finally said. “I think I do.”

Walter looked up at the waiter. “We'll split the cheese plate. Double Stilton. And I'll have coffee and a Drambuie, straight up.” He looked at Karen. “Would you like coffee or tea, and something to go with it?”

“I've heard of Drambuie, but I never had any.”

“It's like scotch on steroids. It's sweet, and has honey and herbs and spices in it. You sip it, in little tiny amounts. It makes your sternum toasty warm inside. You can have it straight up, or on the rocks.”

“Does it taste like scotch?”

“Mmm, yes and no. Mostly no. But unless you try it, you'll never know. And if you don't like it, don't worry, I'll drink it, and you can try something else.”

“Okay,” she said, looking up at the waiter who stood patiently. That's why they call them waiters, she thought. “Coffee and a Drambuie. Straight up.”

“Very good,” the waiter said, and turned away. Just as he left a tall man in a white chef's jacket and toque came toward their table. Walter stood up, smiling.

“Walter!” the tall chef said, embracing Walter in a warm hug.

“Jules, it's so good to see you again! You look well.”

“I am, I am. And you! And your lovely companion. You must introduce me!” Jules turned to Karen and bent at the waist, reaching for her hand and kissing the back of it. Karen blushed furiously; she'd been kissed a lot of places on her body, but no one, much less a world-famous celebrity, had ever kissed the back of her hand.

“Jules, this is my date, Karen Preston. Karen, may I introduce Chef Jules LeClos.”

Jules had never let go of her hand, but now instead of kissing it he clasped it solicitously with both hands. “How was your dinner?”

“Oh, my God,” she said. “Fabulous! I’ve never had anything this good in my life. You are amazing.”

“Ah, I am glad you enjoyed it. Walter, my friend, it was good seeing you again, I must return to the kitchen, we have a big table coming in, and I must perform.”

“Thank you for a wonderful evening, Jules,” Walter said. Jules hurried away, and he sat down.

“Okay, you’ve got to tell me,” she said, leaning forward conspiratorially, “how do you know Jules LeClos, but you’ve never eaten here before?”

“He came out to Chicago about ten years ago. He mainly came to audition law firms to do some work on several restaurants he was opening in the Midwest, and there were some tricky legal things and details involved, real estate stuff, leases, and licensing, contracts, and whatnot. And so while he was out there he did a couple of local TV morning shows, and he was on _Oprah_ , her studio was downtown. Well, the poor guy ran himself ragged morning to night and by the fourth day he was exhausted. We were his last law firm interview, and it’s four in the afternoon and he’s in our conference room, and my people were putting on our dog-and-pony show, and I look over and Jules is asleep. Totally exhausted and burned out. Sitting straight up in his chair, out cold. So I stop the presentation and I say, ‘Come on, Jules, we’re going home.’ And I put him in my car and I call Ellie and tell her to set an extra plate, and we go home. And my daughter and her husband were there, my granddaughter Chelsea was about nine years old, and my daughter was four months pregnant with Chad. And one of my sons was still living at home, so he was there, too, and his girlfriend came over, so there’s about eight of us, all gathered around the dining room table, and we have this kind of noisy but totally boring, unexceptional Thursday night family dinner, and of course Jules gets to meet most of my family, and he tells us about his family and his life, and it’s completely relaxing and low-key for him.”

“So what did you feed the great celebrity chef?”

“Pot roast. It was pot roast night, with parsley potatoes. I forget what the green vegetable was, peas or string beans or something. Pillsbury biscuits, fresh from the tube. Just plain old all-American Thursday night comfort food. And of course he loved it, because his life is nothing but fancy cooking, a lot of which he can’t really eat much of because he’s in the kitchen working. So yes, it was like a vacation for him. And after dinner we go into the den and watch a little TV, he looks at my granddaughter's scrapbook a little bit and talks soccer with my son-in-law, and he falls asleep on the couch and I fall asleep in my chair, and about eleven o’clock Ellie wakes us up and puts Jules to bed in the guest bedroom. The next morning we let him sleep in and I call my office and cancel all my appointments and meetings, and Ellie calls her work and takes the morning off. So about eight Jules wakes up and wanders into the kitchen, and Ellie pumps some coffee into him and feeds him scrambled eggs and sausage links and toast. Afterward he takes a shower, and then I drive him into the city to his hotel, and it’s way after rush hour, you know, so the traffic isn’t bad. And he packs his bags and checks out, and I run him to O’Hare, and we shake hands and he tells me we’re hired, and he gets on a plane and goes back to New York, and my firm and I are now his Midwest go-to lawyers. And the big law firms that wined him and dined him all week are all pissed and they can’t figure out why a pissant little boutique law firm nobody ever heard of out in the ‘burbs gets him for a client, and they don’t. So that’s how I got to pick up the great Jules LeClos for a client. My wife fed him her pot roast.”

The waiter brought the dessert cheese plate and put it in the middle of the table, equally between them, and poured their coffees while the sommelier brought their Drambuies.

“I never had cheese for dessert before,” Karen said.

“Keep an open mind,” Walter said. “The blue Stilton is amazing. It makes you think about dessert in a whole new way.” With a small cheese knife he spread some on a cracker, and fed it to her.

“”You’re right! That’s really good. Who would have thought moldy cheese could replace Ben & Jerry’s as the love of my life.”

“Try the Drambuie, see what you think.”

She took the tiniest sip, so small she had to take another. She began to nod her head. “So many new experiences tonight. Things I’ve never done before, things I only ever read about.” She paused. “So. What is it we’re going to talk about all weekend?”

Walter sipped his coffee, understanding that this was her agreement to his conditions.

* * *

“I’m 66 years old,” he began. “In my entire life I never had a good blowjob. I never had sex with a Playboy Playmate of the Month, or a Penthouse Pet, or any other woman you might put into such a category, or anybody who might even come close. Not even a regular fashion model, much less a supermodel. Never boffed a perky cheerleader, because she was always going steady with the quarterback, and I wasn’t ever that guy. Never fucked the cute girl-next-door or her MILF mother. Never put it to the Swedish au pair girl, never tapped the adorable young babysitter. Never slept with my secretary, never picked up the hat check girl back in the days when they actually had hat check girls. Never joined the Mile High Club with a dazzling flight attendant in the cramped bathroom at 38,000 feet over Denver. I never serviced the sex-starved divorcee down the block. Never wife-swapped with the neighbors. Never had a mid-life crisis affair with a woman twenty years younger than me, in some vain attempt to recapture … whatever it is those guys are trying to find. No trophy wife, no trophy mistress.

“I’m 66, and even though I'm a widower and theoretically free, it’s too late in my life for any of that stuff. But I want to know what some of that might have been like. I don’t mean the cheating, infidelity part; I’m not interested in that aspect at all. It’s the part about making love to a fantastically beautiful, desirable young woman. Call it ‘making love,’ or just call it fucking. Either way, I just want to know … what it might have been like. I want to know ... what I’ve missed. This is the simplest way I can put it: I want to know what it's like to fuck a girl who likes to fuck.”

“I don’t want to seem disrespectful of my wife, not even to her memory. But what I’m saying is, I never made love to a beautiful, sexy, sexual, sensual woman, any of those fantasy women. I loved my wife, we were married 38 years. But look at me – I’m a plain, ordinary man, you couldn’t pick me out of a line-up. And I didn’t look any better when I was 21 or 30, either, than I do now. I am simply just a pot roast and meatloaf kind of guy, plain and ordinary-looking, and never was anything more. I played sports but sat on the bench a lot. I'm a reader, I'm bookish. If I was forty years younger I'd be a nerd. And what I’m saying is, my wife was kind of the same. Yes, she was beautiful to me, and she had much inner beauty. She was smart, she was thoughtful, and she was quiet, but she had inner strength. She had a small-town upbringing, went to church every Sunday every week of her life. She didn’t like profanity, and wouldn’t let the kids swear. In her entire life I don’t think she ever said the word ‘fuck.’ If she ever did, it wasn’t in my hearing.

“Like a lot of couples, our sex life started out what we thought of then as ‘hot-and-heavy.’ That’s even how she got pregnant, while we were still dating. She was two months pregnant when we got married, so after we found out our sex life slowed down a little. And it took a few months after Tom was born before we got back into it, but we did. I suspect we were no different from millions of other couples: twice a day for a few months, then four times a week, then twice a week, then twice a month, and then one day after 15 or 20 years it all just kind of … stops … and what's sad is nobody even notices. A fair number of those people get divorced. The flame goes out, I guess. But a lot of other couples stay married anyway. They become best friends, but friends without benefits, you know? Celibate roommates. I read a statistic recently that something like 40 percent of long-married couples don’t have sex anymore. Well, I believe that statistic. I know exactly what it means. After 20 years or so of marriage, we became one of those 40 percent. I’m not complaining … I’m just--”

“Explaining.”

“Yes. Explaining. Exactly.”

“Okay.” She spread some Stilton on a cracker and fed it to him. He had to chew and swallow, and take a sip of coffee before he could talk again.

“God, that’s good. Thank you. That’s so good you have to close your eyes while you eat it, you know? So anyway, that’s what I’m talking about. We had okay sex, I guess, but it was mostly pretty ordinary, and my wife wasn’t especially interested in it. What they nowadays call ‘vanilla’ sex. And hell, I don’t know, maybe I just wasn’t very good at it, myself. I know it's just ego talking, but I like to think … given the right circumstances--”

“—and the right woman,” she said.

“—and the right woman, yes, that maybe … it would have been good. Really good. Maybe even as good as it is supposed to be in your own imagination. Mind-blowingly good. Crazy insane good, so good you do it all night long, until you’re both exhausted. So good that maybe, one day when you’re 66 years old and you ask yourself, ‘What was the very best sex you ever had in your whole life,’ you can answer, ‘Well, this one time, there was this one girl, one woman, and this one week we made it on the beach, and back in the hotel room, and in the hot tub, and in the sauna, and in the pool and hanging from the chandelier, and we did this, and we did that, and she came like 20 times, 20 different positions, we did the Leopard With His Tail on Fire, we did the Stork and the Black Lotus, we did it in the back seat of my '57 Chevy, we did it on the hood, we did it on the trunk, we splendored in the grass, we did it with the top down in the rain, I licked maple syrup off her eyelids, and I came five times, and I had scratch marks all down my back, and she could hardly walk the next day, we did it facing each other like John Lennon and Yoko Ono in that poster, we did it on a hillside in the spring rain, we did it snowbound in a rustic cabin in a blizzard,’ and you know, whatever your ultimate sex fantasy is, with some movie star, or a girl who reminds you of a movie star, whatever, you name it. Like that. A memory that can last you for a lifetime.

"Well, I don’t have a memory like that. I feel like I ought to, that I missed out on something I’m supposed to have had. What I want to know is ... what it's like to make love to a woman like you. To have sex with a woman so beautiful she belongs in a magazine. A fantasy woman. And I don't mean just fucking her. It's not about the fucking. I mean making love, with her enjoying it and wanting it as much as I do. ”

“Is that what you want this weekend, something like that?” she asked.

“Actually, no. If you’re offering, I appreciate the offer. Thanks, but no.”

“Why not? We could, you know, it’s not out of the question, maybe not so crazy as all of those things, but you know--”

“I know. But the reason why not is because it’s too late. I’m too old. And it’s in no way a reflection on you, because you’d be my all-time ideal candidate. But it’s too late for me. In addition to the fact that even a tenth of all that sex would probably kill me, it wouldn’t be the same thing. What I’d need is a time machine, to go back and be 25 or 30 years old again. I’d need to be that guy with the six-pack abs and the stamina and experience, the sex wisdom, to know how to really do it right. To know how to really make love to a woman as beautiful as you. To do it slowly, to savor every moment. To watch your face when you come, to listen to you cry out as I went down on you, when I did things to you that drove you out of your mind. I’d need my 66-year-old brain in a 30-year-old’s body with a 17-year-old’s testosterone and a 21st century tantric sexual sensibility. And anyway, it’s not about me getting my rocks off. It would be about you, pleasing you, making the experience mind-blowingly good for you. I would have to be good enough that it would be the most memorable experience of _your_ life, too. So that one day when you’re 90, you could rock in your rocking chair on the porch of your nursing home and think back and remember there was this one time, and this guy named Walter. ‘Lord have mercy, what Walter and I did to each other.’ Without it being all that for you, too, well, it wouldn’t be the same thing. Do you get what I’m saying, and why I’m saying no?”

“Yes, I think I do. And I’m sorry. And more than a little bit sad. I wish--” She stopped.

“Wish what?”

“I wish … that we’d met when you were 18 or 19 or 25. You … we … would have had a night like that. A weekend, or even a week.”

“And there’s another reason, too,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“I think … for me … for that fantasy to work … I think maybe we would have had to be in love. It would have had to be more than just sex, more than a fling or a one-night stand. I would have had to be crazy about you. And maybe I wouldn’t be in love with you when we started, but I sure as hell would be by the next morning. I would have been lost. A goner. And I think … I would have hoped … you, too.”

She was looking down at her hands, which held the tiny Drambuie glass. She ran her finger around the rim of it. Her eyes might have been wet. “Wow,” she said. “You’re the whole package, aren’t you? And of course, girls in my line of work, we don’t fall in love with our clients. There’s this real big rule against it. Rule No. 1.”

“Yes, I know. I’ve read the contract. Party of the First Part and all that. Also, Rule No. 2, you may not kiss her on the mouth.’”

“Oh, Walter, you lawyers sure know how to turn a pretty girl’s head.”

“Thank you. We try.”

She saw him glance over her shoulder and a moment later the waiter was there with the bill in a leather binder. “There's no hurry, sir,” the waiter said, “and Chef Jules said to say thank you for coming, and he hopes you enjoyed your dinner.”

“Thank you,” Walter said handing him a credit card without looking at the bill. “Tell Chef it was fabulous. Tell him how much I've always valued our friendship.”

“Very good, sir,” the waiter said. “I'll tell him.”

“Thank you very much for dinner,” Karen said. “Them was the best vittles I ever did et.”

Walter laughed. When the waiter returned with the credit card and the tab for signature, Walter wrote in an amount for the tip and signed it, and put his credit card away. Then he looked up and saw her face.

“What?”

“Nothing,” she said, smiling sweetly.

“No, come on, tell me.”

“It's none of my business.”

“Okay, it's none of your business. Tell me anyway.”

She shrugged. “You never looked at the bill. You never looked at the receipt. You don't have any idea what this cost.”

“You're right. And I guess you're curious why.”

“I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said anything. It's not my business.”

“You said that. But here's what you're dying to know. I don't know what it cost, because I don't care what it cost. I am at a point in my life when money has lost all meaning for me. I was never a very materialistic guy to begin with, and yes, in my law firm I made a ton of money, all I'll ever need for the rest of my life. I have no wife, and my children and my grandchildren are all amply provided for, and so I don't have anyone to spend it on except myself, plus anyone whom I might wish to take to dinner. There's almost nothing I want, nothing I need. So I can afford to squander my modest fortune buying poor but terrifically beautiful working girls all the quarter-pounders and Drambuie and Stilton cheese they can sock away.”

“Okay,” she said, still a little embarrassed.

“Ready to go?”

“Sure.”

When they got out to the street he said, “Let's walk up to the corner, and I'll hail you a cab.”

She stopped short. “I don't understand.” In the light from a streetlamp he could see the look of confusion and hurt on her face.

Walter, too, looked perplexed, but she couldn’t read him. “Okay, I get it,” she said before he could respond. “You've decided you don't want to spend the rest of the weekend with me.”

“No!” Walter said, distressed. “Oh, my God, I'm sorry! I didn't mean it that way at all! I have every intention of spending the weekend with you. I was just about to tell you about ... well, tomorrow. I was going to put you in a cab and send you home so you could get a good night's sleep. I would drop you off at your place except I don't want to know where you live, all that anonymity thing, so I was just going to put you in a cab and you could tell the driver your address and I wouldn't have to know it. And then I would like it ... if you're still willing ... I'd like it if you met me at my hotel about eight o'clock tomorrow morning. We'll go out for breakfast. I was going to say, you should dress casually, slacks and whatever. Bring a jacket, a windbreaker, wear comfortable walking shoes or even sneakers or whatever. We're going to go sight-seeing. And then I was going to say, I think you should also bring a suitcase or overnight bag, or whatever, with a dress you can wear for tomorrow evening. You can change in my suite before we go to dinner, instead of you having to go home to change. I'm sorry, I just didn't explain myself.”

“But ... what about tonight? You know, I kind of expected-- you paid--”

“Yes, I know. And I understand what you're saying. But it's getting late--”

“Nine-thirty isn't late.”

He smiled. “No, I guess when you're 26, nine-thirty isn't late. When you're 66, and a beaten-up old war horse like me, it's pushing the edge of the envelope. Anyway, we've had nearly two bottles of wine, and a couple of after-dinner drinks. Believe me, there's nothing I'd like better than to take you back to my room and spend the night making wild passionate love to you. But the truth is, I'd nod off before the 10 o'clock news came on, and even if I stayed awake, well ... you know. So I know what you were expecting, and I thank you. I've had a wonderful evening already, and I'm really looking forward to tomorrow and Sunday. Is that okay?”

She swallowed, looked away, looked back and down, then up at him. “Okay. Sure. However you want to do it, I'm cool with it. Tomorrow morning, huh? And pack a bag.”

“And bring a jacket.”

“And bring a jacket. Check. Yes, daddy.”

He saw a cab coming and waved it down.

“How are you getting back to your hotel? Can't we share the cab?”

“It's a nice night, I thought I'd walk.”

“Oh. Okay.” But he knew she was confused, and somehow hurt. Rejected, maybe. He opened both doors of the cab and put her in the back seat, and closed her door. Then he leaned into the front door and she saw him hand the driver some cash.

“The lady will give you the address,” Walter told the cabby, and closed the front door. The taxi started to pull away and she gave him a small wave. He was about to turn away and start walking back to his hotel when the cab screeched to a stop. The back door opened and Karen got out, leaving the door open and the cab waiting. She walked up to him on the sidewalk.

“You forgot something,” she said.

“Room and board again? I thought I covered that pretty well.”

“You did. But you forgot something else. You forgot to kiss me goodnight.” And she took his head gently in her hands, leaned forward, and kissed him, tenderly, on the mouth. So much for Rule No. 2. “Thank you for a lovely evening.”

“You're very welcome,” he said.

“Okay,” she said.

“Okay,” he said.

She got back in the cab, he watched it pull away into the evening traffic, and then he walked slowly back to his hotel.

**Saturday**

She knocked on the door of his suite at ten of eight, and he let her in.

“I’m a little early,” she said. “Traffic was so light! I can’t remember the last time I was out and about this early on a Saturday morning.” She had a small overnight bag in one hand and a hanging garment bag with a dress in it slung over her shoulder. He took them and hung the garment bag in his closet, and left the overnight bag on a chair, in case she needed anything from it.

“Let’s go get breakfast,” he said. “I need my coffee.”

“Me, too. Where are we going?”

“You’ll see.”

“Oh, a Man of Mystery,” she pretended to grumble. In the cab he told the driver they wanted the Whitehall Terminal at the foot of South Street. She furrowed her brow, thinking.

“That’s the Staten Island Ferry, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“What’s in Staten Island?”

“I have no idea. It’s the ferry ride we want, not Staten Island.”

“Ah, I get it. A sea voyage. You're taking me on a cruise.”

“It’s the adventurer in me. And they have fine dining aboard, so we can get our coffee and a Danish.”

“And me without my passport. What’s so special about the Staten Island Ferry?”

“Just that I’ve never been on it. It always seems to pop up in the movies and TV shows, thousands and thousands of people commuting to New York every morning, coming to the Big Apple to go to work. I wanted to see what it felt like, to be a commuter like that.”

“Is this more of that thing about you want to see what you’ve missed in life? Your bucket list?”

“Yes, sort of.”

“And the Staten Island Ferry is on your bucket list?”

“Yes. I looked it up. It says this is how 60,000 New Yorkers come to work every day, and go home every night. Twenty million passengers a year. I know what it feels like to commute to work every day by car, I've done it for decades. I wondered what it feels like to take a nice half-hour cruise twice a day instead. Doing something different, going to work by boat. And anyway, it’s been in dozens and dozens of movies.”

On Saturdays the ferries ran every half hour, and because it wasn’t a weekday, and because they were going to Staten Island instead of from it, the boat wasn’t crowded. They got coffee and Danishes from the concession stand on board and found a quiet corner on the upper deck where they could continue the conversation. It was warmer in the direct sunlight, but breezy and a little nippy. He was right to tell her to bring a light jacket.

“You said last night that you wanted to know what it felt like to make love to a beautiful, sexy young woman and it’s too late to do it yourself, so you said,” she said. “Okay. But why not ask somebody who has done that? Or read about it. God knows, there's enough stuff out there to read.”

“I thought about that,” Walter said, “but, lawyer that I am, I came up with a long list of reasons why that wouldn’t work. As it happens, I have read quite a lot, but the trouble with reading about sex is you can't ask questions, you can't say, 'Wait, wait, go over that part again.' You don't see people's faces, you don't pick up body language and facial expressions. No sense of touch, taste, smell. As they say nowadays, it isn't interactive. Now, about the talking. First and foremost, men my age, my generation, we don’t talk about sex to each other in any meaningful way. Sure, men brag in the locker room often enough, but it’s just bullshit, it doesn’t mean anything, and three quarters of the time they’re lying their asses off anyhow. I’ve got half a dozen good friends, guys I’ve known nearly all my life, lawyers, mostly, and we rarely talk much about anything meaningful. We talk work, we talk sports, we talk politics, sometimes we talk about our kids. That’s about it. We never talk about ourselves, our inner lives. And anyway, they are mostly like me, married all their lives to women of my generation, or once in a while to some younger trophy wife, a wife number two or a number three. But those guys, guys like me, we never talk to each other about this personal stuff.”

“And sure, I know men who have fooled around. I know men who can’t keep their dicks in their pants. I don’t like those kind of guys, and I sure as hell wouldn’t ever ask them, ‘Hey, I heard a rumor you nailed so-and-so’s secretary; how was she?’ See, not only would I never even ask, his answer wouldn’t be worth a damn thing. So basically I ruled out my entire generation.”

“So next I thought, well, the next generation, and the one after, the younger guys of today. They would certainly have a much different experience of sex than us old guys. But there’s no way in hell I’m going to have a conversation with some 35-year-old guy about his sex life, and who he was boffing, and how good she was, and did she give good head, and whatever. It would just never happen.

“And then I had a revelation. It occurred to me that I didn’t want to know about having sex with a beautiful woman from _any_ man’s point of view, no matter what age he was or what his experience was. What is a guy's general point of view going to be worth, anyway? He got his rocks off, big deal. If I wanted to know all the fine, detailed, poetic pieces of data, what she smelled like, what she felt like, how she moaned, what her face looked like, what she said, what she felt, I would first have to ask somebody who actually paid attention to that sort of thing. Somebody who knew the answers. So that ruled out about ninety-eight percent of the straight males of this species on this planet. And then I had another revelation. What I wanted to know was what it was like from the _woman's_ point of view. How _she_ felt about it, what _she_ thought about it. Was it good for her, and if so, how? And if it wasn't good for her, well, in that case I wasn't much interested anyway.”

“Why's that?”

“Because if she wasn't into it, then how good could the experience have been? If she was lying there thinking about her to-do list and what to get Aunt Sophie for Christmas, if she was faking it, if she rated this experience a C minus, then what good was it for my purposes? I already know everything there is to know about boring, mediocre, vanilla sex. The fantasy of making love to a Playboy Bunny, a cheerleader, a movie star, a super model, implies that the woman is enjoying it, too, that's it's not only the best sex of the guy's life, but it has to be the best sex she's ever had, too. So then I understood that it wasn't the man's experience I wanted to know about, it was the woman's. And then I realized what I wanted to know about weren't the specific actions. I wanted to know about the feelings. And if it's feelings and emotions you want to know about, do you ask a man? Hell, no.”

She laughed, nodding. "If you want to know about feelings, you ask a woman," she said. "Women are the ones who have the feelings, and can articulate them."

“Exactly. And then almost immediately, I had another revelation.” He saw her smile to herself, and look down at her paper coffee cup in her hands. “You know where this is going, don't you?”

She just smiled. “You tell it.”

“It occurred to me that the person I wanted to talk to was a beautiful young woman who had experienced this wonderful sex with a man, and could tell me about it. But I also realized that it would be even better if this woman had herself made love to an equally beautiful woman. This person would understand what I wanted to know from all perspectives. What it was like to be loved, and what it was like to do the loving.”

“So that's where I come into it,” she said.

“Yes. Your profile on the internet said you not only escorted men, you also went out with couples and women. That when you strip away the euphemisms about 'escorting,' it meant that you had experience with men and women alike. So the basic question was, have you yourself ever made love to a beautiful, desirable woman? And so when I was discussing things with Caroline, that's what I asked her. And she said yes, you had.”

"Two birds with one stone."

"Exactly."

She finished her coffee. "Well, if we're going to walk and talk and sight-see all day, I'm going to need another jolt of caffeine. Wouldja buy a working girl another cup of coffee, Mr. Staten Island Ferry Big Spender?"

Walter laughed, and they went to the snack bar and got refills. Then they climbed the stairway to the top deck. The ferry wasn't crowded, and they found seats far enough away from anyone that they could talk comfortably.

"Okay," she said when they settled in. She sat turned away from him slightly so she could lean back and nestle in against his shoulder, and he put his arm around her along the top of her seat. There was a mild breeze blowing, mainly from the speed of the ferry as it crossed the harbor. "What's the first topic of discussion?"

Walter paused to organize his thoughts, which she thought was a lawyerly thing to do. He was preparing his speech to the jury.

"Blowjobs. In my whole life," he said, "I never had a good blowjob, like I said before. I never had all that many blowjobs to begin with, good or bad, as a matter of fact, because Ellie didn't like them, just like what I'd guess were the vast majority of women in my generation. It was the usual thing, I'd get one for my birthday, and maybe one for Christmas, and that was it for the year. And it was obvious she didn't like doing it. Back when I was in high school, oral sex was widely considered by society to be a perversion. That's the word people used back then: perversion. And the other word was ‘sodomy,’ which has different meanings in different states. Some places it means oral sex, some it means anal sex, and some it means either one, which is even dumber than one or the other. It was against the law in most states, and in a few places people actually went to jail for oral sex. Anal sex was against the law, too. Most of the laws were targeted toward homosexuals, meaning homosexual men, because that's who got the blowjobs and the butt fucks, and in typically sexist, misogynistic fashion, no one cared whose pussy a lesbian licked. So-called 'normal' heterosexuals had regular intercourse in the missionary position, and some idiot had the idea that society should criminalize anything Ozzie didn't do to Harriet. A lot of it was tied to the notion that sex shouldn't be recreational; it's only purpose was to produce children, and if it didn't contribute toward that goal, it was dirty, it was perverted, it was outlawed.

"So these laws sometimes applied, inadvertently, to heterosexual people and even to married couples. These laws had nothing to do with homosexuality, they had to do with criminalizing hetero sex that didn't contribute toward procreation. If you were having sex in a way that didn't make babies, it was illegal. There were places in this very United States of America where it was criminal for a married man to go down on his own wife. Lick his own wife's pussy, even if she wanted it. Until 1962, sodomy was a felony in every single state of the union, every damn one. No exceptions. The very first state to change that was Illinois, my home state, and it was ten years before another state did it. It took years and years to get those stupid, ignorant laws off the books. You have no idea what a struggle it was. And it was a legal battle waged almost entirely in secret. The greatest, most invisible legal battle of the 20th century, in my learned opinion. Stealth jurisprudence. That's one of the things my team learned how to do: work invisibly. You have to check your ego at the door, and go in knowing you will get no recognition. No bonuses, no law review articles, no attaboys. We learned to work in the dark. Metaphorically we deliberately went into the closet, and you can guess who we found hiding there: gay men and women. So a movement that started out primarily to mitigate or remove oral sex and anal sex laws for heterosexuals found a class of invisible people in that closet who became our natural allies and supporters, and often as not our clients. Nobody needed to have cunnilingus made legal more than lesbians, but no one ever heard so much as a peep out of them, legally and criminally speaking. Likewise blowjobs and bumfucking for gay men. To my knowledge no lesbian ever approached a lawyer or legislator and asked to have the law forbidding carpet-munching struck down.

"You might not know this, but it was only a few years ago, 2003, that the Supreme Court invalidated a case called _Lawrence v. Texas_ , which threw out same-sex sodomy laws in 14 states. And up until that year, you know what the penalty for gay as well as hetero sodomy was in Idaho? Life. For a lipstick lesbian going down on her girlfriend. Life in jail, for a blowjob or a butt fuck. They'd send you to prison, where of course the other prisoners would take turns bumfucking you while you were forced to give them blowjobs. That's insane, and you just can't make this stuff up. It’s true those laws were rarely prosecuted and almost nobody ever got the maximum, but it did happen every once in a blue moon, because the great state of Texas caught poor Mr. Lawrence having at it. And can you image what it must have been like in prison for some poor son-of-a-bitch convicted of giving a guy a blowjob? My God. And today, you can go on the internet and find a thousand sites where some young woman is getting butt-fucked by one guy while she blows another. When I was in high school, that act would have theoretically earned that woman two life sentences for two counts of sodomy, one at each end, within the great and sovereign state of Idaho, home of the beloved Russet potato. Can you imagine? All the stuff you see on internet porn sites today? When I was a kid those were felonies punishable by law. Nowadays, your generation would think this was plain crazy, just absurd and insane. And you'd be right.”

"Meanwhile, we were trying to get all this craziness repealed, all several hundred years worth of hypocritical, sanctimonious Judeo-Christian, self-righteous Puritanism. And all of it put onto the books in the first place by guess who? Fucking lawyers. So-called lawmakers. My legal brethren. Legislators from Harvard and Yale and Chicago and UCLA and the East Jesus, Texas, School of Law and Animal Husbandry. So then, slowly, the counter-revolution began. You never heard about it on the nightly news, there were no TV specials about it, nobody ever went on _Oprah_ or _Good Morning, America_ or the _Today_ show to talk about making it legal to eat pussy. God knows no politician ever stood up in a political campaign and said, 'Hey, vote for me, I want to de-criminalize deep-throating and hot monkey butt sex.' But slowly and surely, quietly, we got it done, although it took three generations and nearly half a century. People talk about unsung heroes. Well, let me tell you, there are some unsung heroes out there in the legal field, which is just about the last place anyone would think to look for one, and I'm one of maybe four people in the whole world who can tell you who those unsung heroes are."

"I mention this because one day in 1999 I saw an article in a newspaper. It was about a group of middle school and high school guidance counselors and sex education teachers having a conference somewhere, and the big topic they were discussing was the oral sex their students were having. They had discovered that oral sex – by which they meant blowjobs, not cunnilingus, but of course they couldn't say that in the newspaper – they discovered blowjobs were running rampant in the school systems. They learned from female students that when a girl was going out with a boy and the boy wanted to have sex, meaning intercourse -- what we call 'fucking' -- and the girl didn't want to, the girl would give him a blowjob instead, to keep him happy. So here's all these high school guys, and even boys as young as eighth- or ninth-graders, getting BJs as consolation prizes in school stairwells and under the bleachers and in the bathrooms between classes. It wasn't so much that girls were giving head per se, they were doing it pretty often, much too often. The guidance counselors thought this was a growing problem and they wanted to talk about it.”

“When I read this I was completely, utterly flabbergasted. Blown away, no pun intended. Back in my day, you were lucky if you got into a girl's pants and actually got a finger-fuck or had intercourse, but a blowjob was just about the very last thing you were ever going to get. You had a better chance of getting hit by a meteor than your girlfriend gobbling your Johnson. When I was in high school I didn't even know what a blowjob was until my senior year and some kid brought a skin magazine to school. What I'm telling you is, blowjobs just weren't available in anyone's repertoire, not in our high school age group. You might find that incredible, but it's true. Adults, especially guys who went into the military, knew about them and got them in whorehouses, but us teenagers? No fucking way. And now, here I read in the newspaper that if Jack the high school quarterback wanted to fuck Peggy Sue, the cheerleader captain, and she didn't want to because she was a 'good girl,' why, she'd just suck his cock like it was the consolation prize on Let's Make a Deal. Come on down! In the school stairwell. Between third period civics and fourth period study hall. An honest-to-God, cum-swallowing hummer. My God. Such a fantasy didn't even exist in 1958. When I was in high school I never craved a blowjob simply because I had no notion such a thing existed. And neither did anyone I knew. Guys never talked about blowjobs. We talked about getting to third base. We talked about copping a feel, and titties, and cock-in-pussy fucking."

"I guess it's beyond the realm of possibility that somewhere there was a high school girl who wanted to fuck,” she said, “but to preserve her virtue and virginity some thoughtful 11th grade boy went down on her instead."

“Hello? Welcome to Planet Earth," he said, and she laughed. "Back to reality. You have no idea how this article about blowjobs affected me. It was the world turned upside down. Women willing to give head instead of fucking, and not just women, but the single most desirable kind of woman, the nubile, potentially underage, pony-tailed teenager. With the women of my generation it was exactly the opposite. In my day, if you played your cards right, you might – just might – get some paradise by the dashboard light, but no fucking way were you going to get the thing you begged her for, the thing she wouldn't ever do because it was dirty and disgusting and perverted and how could you ever even _ask_ her to do such a thing, put that horrible thing in her mouth. Ugh. Ewwwww.

"So there I am reading this article and thinking about some pimply juvenile delinquent getting head from a happy, willing, perky, cute-as-a-button cheerleader, and not only that, millions of girls just like her all over the country perfectly happy to do it. They knew all about blowjobs, it was part of their teen subculture. A blowjob, what's the big deal? You don't even have to get undressed. And here's the biggest surprise of all. When they asked kids about it, a lot of them didn't think BJs were actual sex. The most desirable sex act that adult men of my generation craved above all others and _begged for_ , and only ever got on their birthdays or from hookers, this dirty, nasty, perverted afternoon delight so twisted you could go to jail. Teen girls were on their knees delivering high-quality _felonies_ , and all the more desirable because it was so forbidden. A boy who wasn't even old enough to have a learner's permit to drive his dad's Toyota Celica was getting criminally blown as a consolation prize by a girl who was willing to swallow jism and then walk into civics class ten minutes late with a forged hall pass."

Walter could feel her shoulders shaking as she laughed. She had her head bent down and her hand over her mouth. He knew she thought it was hilarious.

"Yeah, yeah, go ahead and laugh," he said, good-naturedly. “The World Turned Upside Down, and we did it, we made it legal, my generation of lawyers and me. We had created the most unimaginable of unintended consequences of all time: a pandemic of teen fellatio.”

The ferry had reached Staten Island, and they had to get off so they could get back aboard. In a few minutes they had re-taken their same seats on the upper deck.

“Where were we?” Walter asked, resuming the conversations.

“Blowjobs,” Karen said. “You were describing a whole new sub-category of penis envy.”

He laughed. “Right. A perfectly terrific, wonderful, rare-as-hen's-teeth perversion, ruined. Gone up in smoke, in a single generation. So now I’ve set the scene for you: Much sought-after underground criminal behavior worth every bit of the twenty years some judge in Kansas would happily hand down gets trivialized, decriminalized, and handed out as some pimple-faced loser’s door prize, thanks for playing the home game. Some 14-year-old dork who can’t even spell ‘fellatio’ is getting it free of charge and he's clueless that the randy gods on Mount Olympus have smiled down upon him. At the very least this acne-faced cretin should be so everlastingly grateful that upon graduation he should enter the Peace Corps, move to Africa and spend the rest of his miserable life washing the feet of lepers.”

“The terrible injustice of it all,” she said.

“Now you’re getting it,” he said. “Okay, let’s move forward a few decades from my high school days. Bill Clinton’s in the White House, and this 22-year-old intern gives him a BJ in the Oval Office, and the world goes howling insane. Millions of words are written about it, and in all that outrage, not one single person, at least not to my knowledge, ever wrote about the generational disconnect. All the women of _my_ generation are disgusted, because they all know blowjobs are nasty and disgusting, ewwwwww. And all the young women of _your_ age group are thinking, yeah, a hummer, so what? It’s not like they fucked or anything. It’s hardly even sex. He gets some cum on her dress, big deal, so what? A woman of my generation would have been furious, she would have torched that dress at the temperature of the inner core of the sun. A woman of your generation? He got cum on your dress? Send it to the dry cleaners, which you're going to do anyway. But Monica keeps the damn thing as a keepsake, a souvenir. And not only does Lewinski suck the chrome off the trailer hitch of the President of the United States, she goes and _tells_ somebody! A generation earlier Idaho would have shipped her ass off to prison. She talks about it, casually, to somebody who is barely even a friend. She brags about it. She complains he stained her dress. Monica just couldn't keep her mouth shut, in more ways than one. And who does she brag to? One of her peers, who would understandably take it with a grain of salt? Hell, no. She tells a Ewwwwww Boomer who think BJs are awful and disgusting. A woman who doesn't get it, that nowadays a blowjob is almost as meaningless as a high five on your knees. So it's not only a generational difference in behavior, there's a generational difference about how we _talk_ about that behavior.

“You see? Massive disconnect. And the men of my generation are the ones who _really_ melted down. The women were outraged, but most of the men had to fake it. Clinton dishonored the Oval Office and the Presidency, yadda yadda, and oh, they have to pretend how awful it is. Clinton is the Satanic arch-villain, possibly the Anti-Christ. But me, except for the cheating-on-his-wife part I’m thinking Bill Clinton is my fucking hero. A pasty, overweight, middle-aged fifty-something guy, not even good-looking, and he gets his Johnson smoked, free of charge, from a 22-year-old. And not one guy in my generation has the balls to stand up and say, ‘Good for you, Bill,’ even though every fucking one of them would kill for even a mediocre blowjob. And of course, there is the whole, massively important cheating thing. Were the women incensed because he cheated, or incensed because he got a blow job they themselves hated doing? Most of these guys haven’t gotten a BJ in 20 years, and the last time some of them got one they had to pay for it from a 15-year-old bar girl in Saigon. All these middle-aged, sanctimonious Boomer pillars-of-the-community have to hide their woodies and feign outrage that one of their own fellow Boomers got what their wives stopped doing on the night of their 25th birthdays. The hypocrisy is that most of these guys would crawl on their bellies over broken glass and barbed wire to get some decent head, but of course they can’t ever say that. Was there an abuse of power between a lowly intern and the most powerful man on the planet? Sure, but nobody can talk about that, because it's secondary to the act itself, and the location, and he's married, blah blah blah. And how many of them had cheated themselves? The numbers on marital cheating are everywhere available. Clinton didn't do anything half the married men in America hadn't done. So they concentrate on the fact that he simply lied about it. Well, of course he lied about it. So would every fucking one of the men who tried to impeach him. Are you fucking kidding me? He lied? Really? And in all that fuss that went on for a few years, you know what nobody ever said? Nobody said fellatio was illegal and Monica should go to jail. Nobody suggested it was a criminal act. The long, long history of the criminality of blowjobs had vanished into thin air."

"And that was you. Your work."

"Well, no, not me. Not specifically, anyway. But people like me, and some of my people, yes. Lawyers, working quietly in the dark."

“Okay, here’s a true story,” Walter said. “There’s a lawyer in our firm named Bob. Good all-purpose lawyer, nice guy, not especially devious or cut-throat as lawyers go, and a family man. He’s Catholic and pretty devout, his family goes to confession and mass every week and his kids go to parochial school. And the apple of Bob’s eye is his oldest son, Chris. Chris is a wunderkind. Scholar, athlete, choirboy, you name it. If you run into Bob in the hallway and you say, ‘Hey, Bob, how’s it going?’ Bob is going to tell you all about the latest wonderful thing Chris did. He just made honor roll. He just made first-string varsity. He just won the science fair. I fully expect some day to say, ‘Hi, Bob, what’s happening?’ and he’ll say, 'Hey, Walter, everything’s great. Hey, did I mention Chris just won the Nobel Peace Prize? Yeah, and the Yankees signed him to play centerfield, but he decided instead to figure out a way to solve that whole India-Pakistan border thing. So, you know, he’s going to Oslo next week for the award ceremony.’ So that’s Bob and his son, Chris.”

“Got the picture,” Karen said.

“Right. So this story takes place about eight or ten years ago, when Chris was a high school senior. He went to this all-boys Catholic school, St. Ignatius Loyola. And there’s this upscale private school in our area, Harrington Prep. In fact, my younger granddaughter goes there. Good school, but small, at the time of this story there were about twenty kids in the senior class, each and every one of them going to college, because they’d all been hand-groomed and prepped, that’s what Harrington Prep does. It preps.”

“Got it.”

“So the background is that one of the graduating senior girls at Harrington needs a prom date. She’s a good Catholic girl but doesn’t have a boyfriend, and she knows Bob’s son Chris from church, so she asks him to take her to the prom. Chris knows the girl, but it isn’t like they hang out together. She just knew Chris was this hunk and a big shot at St. Iggy’s, so she took a flier and asked him. No big deal, right? Girl asks the guy out? No biggie, not even worth commentary. So one day I happen to see Bob at a meeting, we were waiting for a client to show up for a deposition, and Bob’s telling me all about this girl from Harrington who asked Chris to be her prom date, and it was going to be a double date thing, she and another girl had rented this limo, and it was going to take these two couples out to dinner and then to the prom, and whatever. And I’m so used to hearing these stories about how Chris did this and Chris is doing that, that I hardly even pay much attention. And it turns out that I met the girl once or twice, Ellie and I know her parents socially, they live a few blocks away, Ellie and this girl’s mother were in some charity organization together. The girl seemed like a nice kid, not the smartest kid in school, but smart enough to get by. Not bad looking, but not anybody’s fantasy girl, you know? Kind of your average upscale preppie kid, a little spoiled, a little over-privileged, but these days, whose upper-middle-class kid isn’t?

“So anyway, the following week I happen to run into Bob at the coffee machine, and I say, ‘Hi, Bob, how’s the family? Did Chris have a good time at the prom?’ I’m just being polite, expecting some sort of innocuous story I will forget by the time I get back to my office with my coffee. But Bob throws me a total curve ball. 'Well,’ he says, ‘Chris said it was kind of strange.’ ‘Oh,’ I say, ‘how’s that?’ And he says, ‘Well, there were these two couples, and they rented a limo, and all. The guys are in their tuxedos and the girls are in their prom formals, and they have the corsages and everything, and they go to dinner, and then on the way to the prom party, his date asks him if he wants a blowjob.’”

Karen started laughing.

“Yeah, exactly! And I practically spill my coffee all over my suit. But Bob keeps telling me this story, and I’m thinking, Bob, why are you telling me this? Too much information, TMI, like my grandkids say. But Bob is oblivious. He says, ‘Chris told me the next day what the girl asked him, and he said to me, “Dad, I was so embarrassed and I didn’t know what to say, so I just said ‘No, thanks.’”

“And then Bob starts going on and on about these kids today, and it’s not just the boys, it’s the girls, too, they have no morals any more, and blah blah, he’s going on about the decline of morality and how sex is running rampant through the school system, and thank goodness his Christopher isn’t like that, and so on, and I’m making sympathetic noises, tsk, tsk, shaking my head sadly, and I’m trying to think of some way to get the hell out of this awkward conversation. And thank God my cell phone went off just then, so I excuse myself and take my call.”

“So after the deposition I go back to my office, and I’m thinking about this conversation, which I’m sure is very different from what Bob was thinking. And I’ve got a dozen questions running through my head.”

“Like what kind of a deviant 18-year-old turns down a blowjob,” Karen said. “Maybe he's gay.”

“Maybe, but I don't see a gay kid telling his father, because it gets too close to the kid's orientation. If Chris was gay, he didn't know it yet. And I think that would just about kill Bob if his son turned out to be gay. But gay or straight, the $64,000 question is still what 18-year-old turns down a blowjob? I can sort of half understand it, because Chris had been going to parochial school all his life, and I’m certain he was a virgin, even though he was Mr. High School All-American Hunk of the Year, he’d been in this religious, cloistered environment, and for all I know he never even kissed a girl, much less got his ashes hauled. But that said, what kind of kid tells his own dad about it? ‘Pop, she offered to smoke my Johnson but I told her no thanks.’ It’s weird enough that it even happened, but then to turn around the next day and tell your father? You want to talk about perverse, what could be more perverted than telling Dad you took a pass on a hummer. I simply cannot imagine myself having that conversation with my own father in a thousand years. Ten thousand years. It's like Monica Lewinski blabbing to her much older friend. Whatever happened to 'What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas'?”

“I take it you and your dad never talked about sex?”

“Hardly ever. Once he just said to me, ‘Don’t do anything stupid. Use protection and don’t knock anybody up.’ That was our entire discussion about the birds and the bees. Don’t knock anybody up, don’t catch anything. Of course, this was also twenty years before anybody ever heard about AIDS. Before there even was such a thing as AIDS, maybe. Today we call them STDs, but back then they were called venereal diseases, VD. All I knew about was the Clap, and I probably couldn’t have told you what Clap was. Clap was the Clap, not gonorrhea, and you didn't want any of it. Syphilis was something Al Capone died of. Crabs. We joked about crabs, but I never knew it meant pubic lice. This was back when guys like me carried a Trojan in their wallets, just in case they ever got lucky. Which of course most of us never did. I sometimes wonder how many prophylactics died poor, lonely, withered, shriveled, desiccated, virginal deaths in teenage boys' wallets. Got to be in the millions.

“And the final thing is, I can’t imagine why Bob is telling me all about it. It’s not like any other conversation I ever had with anybody, not a friend or a work colleague, or a relative, not anybody.”

“It's a new world," Karen said. "Monica runs her mouth to Linda Tripp, because she's so used to talking about sex with women her own age, and she forgot Tripp is one generation up. Chris tells his dad. His dad tells you. And then there’s the fact that Bob is expecting you to agree with him, to be sympathetic, or to agree that his son did the right thing.”

“Yes, there’s that. And I may have nodded my head or made sympathy sounds, but the truth is, I was just too appalled to say anything at all. And what was I going to say? 'Bob, your son is the dumbest smart kid I ever heard of, and if it was me, yes, I've have gladly accepted the blowjob, and then I would have gone down on her in grateful appreciation, and rocked her world, and the very last thing I'd have ever done was tell my father about it.”

“You'd have rocked her world, huh?”

“Damn right I would. She'd have walked into that prom three hours late, bowlegged, stars in her eyes, grinning from ear to ear and begging her galpals for Chapstick. I'm all about 'Turnabout is fair play.'”

Karen threw back her head and laughed; they both did. They were still grinning when the ferry pulled into the dock and they disembarked to catch a taxi. “Washington Square,” Walter told the driver, “North side, by the arch.”

After Walter paid the driver they walked through the arch. “This arch was originally built in 1889 to celebrate the centennial of George Washington’s inauguration, financed by a businessman and kind of temporary. But everyone liked it, so they had the famous architect Stanford White design a big permanent one. He based it on the Arch de Triomphe in Paris, which is based on the Arch of Titus in Rome–”

“Wait a minute,” Karen said. “It’s a copy of a copy? Third generation pile of marble? So why does Stanford White get any credit for designing it. Titus should sue the hell out of both Paris and Stanford White.”

“Now you’re thinking like a lawyer,” Walter said. “It’s such a kinky turn-on.” She laughed.

They strolled into the park, turning right up the walk toward the north corner where MacDougal Street crossed Waverly Place. They walked arm-in-arm, comfortably and casually. It was warmer here than on the water, and Karen took her jacket off and carried it over her arm.

“You're wondering what we're doing here,” Walter said. “We've had our sea voyage. Now we're on a pilgrimage. We're going to visit some religious shrines and holy places. This park is one of them. You're a New Yorker; do you know its history?”

“I'm ashamed to say I don't,” Karen said. “I mean, I know it's very popular, and there's always political rallies and stuff here. Obama gave a speech here during his first campaign. People play chess here, that's been in some movies. There's always people playing all kinds of music.”

“That's right,” Walter said. “Okay, first off, we're in the heart of Greenwich Village. To me this is all sacred ground for that reason alone. That’s all you have to say, just ‘The Village.’ Up ahead, that's MacDougal Street, and Bleeker Street crosses it a couple blocks over to our left. For me, the names MacDougal and Bleeker are magic. See that building on the far corner up ahead? That's the Washington Square Hotel. It's a nice hotel now, but only because somebody bought it in the 1970s and renovated it. It used to be called the Earle Hotel, and Ernest Hemingway and Dylan Thomas stayed there. By the 1950s and 60s it was rundown, just a step up from a flophouse. A lot of famous musicians stayed there before they became rich and famous. The Rolling Stones, John and Michelle Philips of the Mommas and Papas. Do you know Joan Baez's song _Diamonds and Rust_?”

“Yes, sure, I know it.”

“Remember when she sings, 'Now you’re smiling out the window of that crummy hotel over Washington Square'? Well, she and Bob Dylan shacked up there together, in Room 305, overlooking the park.” He pointed. “It's that window, there. That was the crummy hotel.”

“Gee,” she said. “Wow. Dylan and Baez. How do you know all this stuff? You've been here before, I take it.”

“Yes.” He turned his back on the hotel and faced the other side of the park and pointed again. “A lot of these buildings are now part of New York University, although they weren't always. But look, see that building over there? That's NYU School of Law. I've given lectures and done some recruiting there. Attended conferences, all that. So yes, I've been in this park dozens of times. You know who came here once upon a time? Robert Louis Stevenson, the guy who wrote _Treasure Island_? He came to America for a tour and while he was here he met Mark Twain right in this very park. They sat on a bench and chatted.”

The path curved around to the left and led them to the intersection of MacDougal and West 4th as Walter kept up his narrative. “Folksingers started hanging out and performing in this park right after World War II, down by the fountain, and after a while it began to bother city officials, who started requiring permits for people to sing or perform. By 1961 they were complaining that the folksingers were drawing too many 'undesirables' into the park, and by 'undesirables' they meant beatniks. And then one day the city denied a request for a permit to somebody, and that touched off a protest. A locally famous guy named Izzy Young owned a folklore center on MacDougal, and he used to let young Bob Dylan hang out in the back room listening to folk music records, which is where Dylan met Dave Van Ronk. Izzy also produced Dylan's first concert, at Carnegie Chapter Hall. Anyway, Izzy organized a protest about the permit thing, and 500 people showed up including a lot of musicians, who sang songs without that permit. Then they marched through the arch we came through and over to Judson Memorial Church ---- it’s right over there. Well, by that time the cops got nervous and sent in the Riot Squad with billy clubs to break it up, and ten people got arrested. When it hit the newspapers they called it 'the Beatnik Riot.'”

“The other thing you need to know about this park is its ancient history. Four hundred years ago there was a marsh and a creek that ran through here, and there was an Indian village here. The Dutch settlers attacked the village and there was a big battle. They drove the Indians off and took over their land. Heard that story often enough, right? Later on, the Dutch gave the land to some of their black slaves, which turned the slaves into free men. Free black families lived and farmed here. A hundred-something years later, after the Revolutionary War, the city bought this land to be used as a Potter's Field, a public cemetery. The city limits hadn't extended this far north back then, and they wanted a place outside of town to bury all the dead from yellow fever epidemics. They say there's upwards of 20,000 people buried here under our feet.”

“And look over there, see that real tall tree just this side of the Washington Square Hotel? That's called Hangman's Elm, it's over 330 years old, the oldest tree in Manhattan. Legend has it it was used to hang criminals, although there's no good record of it. They say there were hangings and executions here when it was a Potter's Field, but the only recorded execution was of a woman who had allegedly committed arson. She was hung over that direction to the left somewhere, not at Hangman's Elm.

“So then we move forward another hundred years, when it’s a park," he said. "Did you ever hear of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire?”

“Oh, sure. It was a sweatshop where they made women's blouses, and there was a fire and lots of women died. It was in 1911.”

“Right. If we turn around the building is right over there, just behind the Silver Center for Arts and Sciences. A hundred forty-six workers, twenty-three men and a hundred twenty-three women, most of them Jewish or Italian immigrants, most of them teenagers or women in their early twenties. Two of them were only 14 years old. Well, after the fire there was a march held here in commemoration. There were more than 20,000 people here. They had more than 25,000 a couple years later for a women's suffrage march. We're on hallowed ground as much for women as men.”

"This piece of turf, only nine and three-quarters acres, tells the story of almost everything that happened in America," he said. "European colonists fighting and displacing Native Americans. Colonists importing and holding black slaves, and then freeing those slaves. Black people living free. Urban expansion and the city taking land to use for whatever purpose it wanted. Women’s suffrage and the origins of protest and civil rights movements, whether it was Civil War draft riots, World War I pacifism, the Shirtwaist Fire marchers, the labor movement for both men and women. Industrial safety, worker safety. Then after World War II, the culture wars started here. Beatniks, jazz musicians, folk music. Gays and lesbians rallied here, and the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street is only about four, five blocks up. Protests for all kinds of social justice. Vietnam protests. Civil Rights demonstrations. All of it, all right here."

They walked up West Fourth two blocks and turned left onto Jones Street. It was an old, narrow street with narrow sidewalks, lined with two- and -three-story houses and small apartment buildings that had seen better days. After they passed three parked cars Walter stepped out into the middle of the street, looking back at the intersection of Fourth. There was no traffic. Karen walked out into the street to stand beside him. “More hallowed ground?” she asked him.

“Very,” he said, pointing. “In 1963 there was a sky-blue Volkswagen bus parked right over there. It was February, snow on the ground, streets full of slush. You know what happened right here in February 1963?”

“No idea in the whole wide world. What?”

“Bob Dylan had an apartment with his girlfriend, Suzie Rotolo, just around the corner on Fourth Street--”

“Wait, that was a Dylan song? _Positively Fourth Street_.”

“Right, you know your Dylan. But nobody knows if that song refers to this Fourth Street here in the village or the Fourth Street near where he lived in Minneapolis. Nobody even knows who that song is supposed to be about, a girlfriend, a fellow folksinger or somebody in the music business, a critic, a friend ... it's a mystery and Dylan himself refuses to explain it. The lyrics are pretty bitter, and he's obviously mad at somebody who has betrayed him in some way, we just don't know who or how. After it came out dozens of people Dylan knew were worried it was about them. But nobody knows. For a long time I used to be annoyed that Dylan wouldn't explain these kinds of things, but over the years I've grown to admire him for it. I like it that there are still unexplained mysteries in the world.

"But anyway, this historic moment doesn't concern that song, just the fact that he lived around the corner. In February of '63, when he was dirt poor and virtually unknown, Dylan and Suzie had their picture taken by a photographer named Don Hunstein, who was the staff photographer for Columbia Records, which was producing Dylan's second album. It was a cold day, there was snow and slush on the street, a little snow on top of parked cars, snow on top of that VW bus, and Bob and Suzie are walking down the middle of the street – as you can see, there's never much traffic on it. They are just about penniless. He's got no hat, no gloves, no scarf, she's got no hat, his hands are in his pockets. He's wearing this thin, inappropriate buckskin jacket because he has no proper winter coat. She's hanging on his arm, they're freezing to death but they are keeping each other warm. Poor as church mice and frozen cold, but they look happy and in love with each other. There's an unspoken message that resonates with a couple million kids in their teens and twenties: We've got nothing but each other. It's you and me, babe, against the world. Our love will keep us alive. You probably already know it, but this photo becomes one of the most iconic album covers in modern rock music history. The album, i> _The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan,_ becomes his first major hit, the one that puts him on everybody's radar and starts the legend. It had _Blowin' in the Wind, Masters of War, Girl From the North Country, A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall, Don't Think Twice, It's All Right_. Bob and Suze were walking right about here, where we're standing now, when that photo was taken.”

Walter turned and looked down Jones Street, the way Dylan and Suze had come. “All they had was each other,” he said quietly, “and for them, at least on that miserable, cold, gray, raw day with the streets full of dirty slush, it was enough. Enough for them, and enough for a couple million other kids with no one but each other, and six bucks in their pockets. For a while I was one of them.”

They walked back toward Washington Square, Karen with her arm through his, like Susie Rotolo hugging Bob as they walked. "Hungry?" Walter asked.

"I could eat," Karen said.

"Good. Let's go."

"Where to?"

“Houston at Ludlow,” Walter said. "It's only eighteen or twenty blocks. Not too bad of a walk to build an appetite."

“Another shrine?” Karen asked.

“I'm starved, and I need a pastrami on rye as soon as humanly feasible. But yes, it's a shrine. Katz's Deli. It's the oldest, and ranked as one of the best in the city. And it's the deli where they filmed that scene in _When Harry Met Sally_ where Meg Ryan fakes her orgasm. Did you ever see that movie?”

“Oh, sure. In my profession faking orgasms is considered a basic, entry-level job skill. We consider that movie a documentary.”

“I suppose so. But speaking of orgasmic, Katz's still carves its pastrami by hand. I know it's a little early for lunch, but there's method in my madness. You'll see.”

“Walter Tapley, Man of Mystery,” she said.

“You bet,” he said.

“You know, Walter, I'm beginning to get a different idea about you.”

“Oh? How so?”

“At first I thought you were this hard-wired establishment kind of guy. A 'suit.' I mean, you were a corporation lawyer, and the head of a law firm and all, right?”

“But?”

“You have all these hidden layers. You aren't who you seem. There's a big part of you that's still anchored in the 1960s. You've got a forty-dollar haircut and a three-piece suit, you drink malbec and eat Kobe beef. But you're a sixties guy. I don't mean you were then. I mean you still are, now.”

“That's called your roots,” Walter said. “In many circles it's thought to be a good thing, to remember your roots and where you came from. Me, I came less from a place than a time. An era. I'm not tied to some town or village or city, I'm tied to an ethos. A vision. A set of notions and ideas about the world, about how things are and ought to be.”

* * *

After getting his order ticket, Walter told the maitre’d on duty he wanted a table instead of ordering at the counters. They had to wait a few minutes, even though the full lunch rush wasn’t on yet, because it was Katz’s and always busy. When they were seated, he said, “You probably know the sandwiches here are huge, we'll both have trouble finishing just a half, but don't worry about the leftovers. I have a plan.”

“Why am I not surprised?”

Karen ordered a tuna on wheat. Walter ordered the pastrami "lean and mean, no speck," and then added to the waitress, “Gladys, I also want to place an order to go. We'll take it with us when we leave.” He took a piece of note paper from his shirt pocket and read from it. “I want two pastramis extra lean, one turkey and Swiss on wheat, three tuna salad platters, one chicken salad platter, a spinach knish, three chicken noodle soups, and four slices of cheesecake.”

“Got it,” Gladys said, reading the order back to him. “Somebody's having a party.”

“Something like that,” he said. When she left with the menus, Walter said to Karen, “That's Gladys. She one of the newer waitresses here at Katz's. She's only been here twenty-seven years.”

“Practically a rookie,” Karen said. She thought about asking who the food was for, but decided she'd find out in due course. "What is shpeck?"

"Shpeck is the thin layer of fat on pastrami that's got all that pepper and spices stuck to it. It's spelled s-p-e-c-k but they pronounce it shpeck. When you go to the counter to order, you ask for either lean and mean, meaning no shpeck, or juicy like Lucy, with the shpeck on it."

When they were finished eating they went to the register, where they picked up several large shopping bags filled with Walter's take-out. On the street Walter hailed a taxi and gave the driver an address in SoHo. “I called this morning and told the people who live here that I was going to drop by with lunch for everybody,” he told Karen. When the cab pulled up in front of a row house, Walter told the driver to wait and keep the motor running. He and Karen got out with the shopping bags of food and went up a few steps to the door. Walter rang the bell, standing in front of the spy-hole in the door, and after a moment a woman in her forties opened the door.

“Hey, Walter, good to see you again,” she said. The woman looked at Karen standing behind him.

“Veronica, this is my friend Karen,” Walter said. “Don't worry, you can trust her, she's good people. Here's your lunch. Tell everyone to enjoy. I added some cheesecake, you can split it up however you want, everybody can get a couple bites. It's so rich that's all anybody would want.” He and Karen handed their bags to the woman, who in turned passed them off inside to someone they couldn't see.

“Thanks very much, Walter. Do you want to come in? I'm sure some of the girls would want to thank you in person, and it looks like there's enough food to share.”

“No, that's okay,” Walter said. “We just ate, and we have places to go.”

“Oh, okay. Well, thanks again. Will we see you next time you're in New York?”

“Oh, you never can tell when I'll drop around,” Walter said. “See you next trip.”

In the taxi Walter gave the driver an address on Fifth Avenue uptown. Then he lowered his voice so the cabbie couldn't hear.

“That house is a shelter for battered women, women who have had to escape from their abusive husbands or boyfriends on an emergency basis. Its address is secret, so the husbands or boyfriends can't find the women, track them down. There's social workers and some police around the city who know where it is, and they know how to get in touch and get women who need it into it. I know you won't mention the address to anyone.”

“No, of course not. But how do you know about it?”

“I guess you might say I'm one of the owners. Some years ago the head of our New York office came to me with this idea. She was doing some pro bono for a battered wife who had nowhere to go, and she wanted permission to work on the problem and solicit funding from other lawyers in the firm. So I said sure, gave my blessing, and hit up all our people for contributions. Every single lawyer in the firm ponied up, and we actually bought that house. We own it, tax write-off, of course, and we hired Veronica, who is a licensed professional social worker, who answered the door, to run it. And we expanded the program, so now we also have a residency in Chicago and one in San Francisco. We even have a kind of underground railroad/witness protection program. If one of the women we shelter needs to get out of the city altogether, we send her to Chicago or out west, and women from there can come here, if need be. Our own mini witness protection program.”

“Wow, that's impressive. How many women have you got stashed away, Walter?”

They were walking leisurely up 5th Avenue toward Central Park, stopping to look in the store windows.

“To tell you the truth I don't know. Part of it is because of the secrecy thing, and I don't have any particular need to know the number. And anyway the number fluctuates as the circumstances in each woman's situation changes. Sometimes the woman has a child or a couple of kids, and they have to be taken in, too. I get a monthly report and an annual report, but it's only a few paragraphs and mostly financial and tax and fundraising stuff, but no head count. Amount of donations in, costs going out, that kind of thing. We're scrupulous about the accounting, but couldn't care less about the number of women. We don't keep score. If there's a specific problem I sometimes get a phone call in the middle of the night and we just deal with it. Usually the woman running the house has a problem and she has a plan and runs it past me and I say 'Okay, do it' and that's about it. Get a restraining order, hire some security for somebody, buy an airplane ticket, get some emergency medical or psychological care for somebody. Over the years I've paid for a couple of abortions and once we paid for what we called a 're-kidnapping.' There was an abused wife who had legal custody of her 4-year-old daughter, but her soon-to-be ex-husband kidnapped the daughter, aided and abetted by his parents, the daughter's grandparents, and then fled the jurisdiction with her. Well, we got right on it, and there were all sorts of legal problems, jurisdiction problems, just take my word for it that it was just a legal mess. So after a day or two hassling with it, and because we had good reason to believe the husband was about to flee yet again, I just told our people, 'Fuck it. Hire some detectives and re-kidnap the daughter.' So we dropped all the court orders and writs and injunctions and all that, and put some people on the case. They had to do surveillance on the grandparents, and they led us to the husband and daughter a couple days later. They were at an airport with tickets to fly to Italy. Long story short, we reunited the girl with her mother and moved them to a new city, and the father was found unconscious and a bit roughed up in a men's room at the airport in Milan. When the Italian police finally talked to him in the hospital, he said he couldn't remember how he'd gotten there or who had beaten him up, and he declined to press charges against anybody, because he couldn’t remember. Funny thing, the date rape drug has other uses beside rape."

"Wow, counselor, isn't that pretty risky? Aren't you, what do they call it, an 'officer of the court?'"

"I'm not an officer of the court in Italy," Walter said. "Only here."

"Uh-huh."

He shrugged. "Sometimes the law is very elastic."

"Is it that elastic"

"Um, not usually."

"I see. You really _are_ the go-to guy, aren't you? The Godfather meets the A-Team meets Ray Donovan."

"Hey, in my entire career, that was the only time I ever -- what's the right term of art? -- the only time I ever went rogue. And I didn’t know the details, what they were going to do to him."

"Went rogue. I like that," she said, laughing. "What would the bar association in Chicago say?"

"In Chicago? You kidding me, lady? Al Capone's home town? In Chicago I'm Mother Theresa." He looked at his watch. “It's a little after three. I've given a great deal of thought to the question of where to have dinner and what to do afterward.”

“I bet you have,” Karen said. “I'm very impressed with your planning skills. You are easily the best long-range planner I've ever met. I can't wait to hear what you've got up your sleeve.”

“Well, thank you. Here's what I've decided: You decide.”

“Huh? I don't think I follow.”

“Last evening and for most of today until this moment, I've done all the decision-making, right?”

“Well, that's how it works, doesn't it? You're the client, I'm the escort. I thought our roles were pretty clear.” She looked at him. “But I can tell by the grin on your face that there's a flaw in that reasoning.”

“Not a 'flaw,' exactly. But our relationship doesn't feel like client/escort, at least not to me, and I hope not to you, either.”

“No, it doesn't,” she admitted.

“Good. So anyway, I wondered if maybe there's some place you'd always wanted to go, or someplace you've been to before and want to go back to. I mean, one of the major points of this weekend is that I want to know what _you_ think about things. You're a person, you have ideas. Thoughts and feelings. You're intelligent, sophisticated, knowledgeable. And it's your city, you know a lot more about it than I do.”

She laughed. “Well, I'm not so sure about that. You've been teaching me things about my hometown left and right.”

“I'm still just basically a tourist. Anyway, think about it. We've got time, a couple of hours.”

“Okay, I'll work on it,” she said.

“And after dinner, too. Whatever you want. A movie, a play, a concert, a nightclub. A quiet little bar--”

“We could go up to the observation deck at the Empire State Building and see if Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan show up,” she said. “You're a movie guy.”

“Meg's going to be disappointed,” he said. “Tom's in Europe producing a movie.”

“And you know this how? Don't tell me you're also Tom Hanks's lawyer."

"Oh, heavens, no. Willie Geist mentioned it on MSNBC this morning."

* * *

“I am by no means a bean-counter and numbers-crunching kind of guy,” he said as they strolled up 5th Avenue, “but ever since I was a kid I've been good at math, and then there's a part of my job wrangling attorneys and their blessed fees, praise the lord and hallelujah, that require me to spend some time in the company of true bean-counters. Since I like numbers and I'm comfortable with them, it isn't nearly as dismal as it might sound. But what I want to talk about now are what I have always called the 'Unknowable Numbers.'”

“Well, that sounds tantalizingly cryptic,” she said. “I can hardly wait.”

“You'll soon change your tune, young lady, when you understand that it's almost entirely about sex.”

“Sex and accounting. An irresistible combination. I'm titillated beyond measure. Do tell!”

“I shall. But first, some context. There's about 7 billion people on the planet, and each year about 60 million people die, and about 71 or 72 million are born. The population grows by about 15 percent, more or less. Don't fall asleep yet.”

“You have me spellbound.”

“I bet. Okay, about 7 billion people. So I asked myself, on any given day, how many of those 7 billion get laid? Half a billion? A billion? I looked it up. It appears to be about 400 million people, so yes, not quite half a billion, but getting there. I found another statistic that says at any given moment about 4,000 people are fucking. Right now, this very second, somewhere on Planet Earth, 4,000 people are doing the deed.”

“Too bad we're not among them,” she said, laughing.

He laughed, too. “Well, yes, I suppose. But hang on, here we go with the unknowables. If 400 million people have sex today, how many had orgasms?”

“Well, I guess we can assume all the men did, right? Wait. No, we can't. Sometimes the phone rings, they drop dead, they lose their hard-ons, performance anxiety, the kids open the bedroom door--”

“Right. Shit happens, even when you're getting laid in the Gobi Desert. But let's assume about, oh, 97 percent of the men have one orgasm each. That's nearly 200 million orgasms.”

“That's a lot of jism,” she said.

“Well, if the apocryphal names of the singing groups Loving Spoonful and 10cc mean anything, which they don't, the math is easy,” he said.

"Wait," she said, multiplying in her head. "Two billion cc's?"

"Mathematically correct, but factually wrong," he said. "Ten cc's didn't get their name from the quantity of male ejaculate, contrary to popular lore. They somehow heard that a male ejaculate was about 9 cc's, and them being manly Englishmen, their ejaculates must have been even better, so 10 ccs. In fact, the average ejaculate turns out to be between 3 and 4 cc's and the name 10cc came to their band manager in a dream."

"I'm truly shocked to learn that men exaggerate their sexual statistics," Karen said.

"Me, too. Never saw that one coming, no pun intended."

"Of course not. I have no doubt you also know about spoonfuls. Spoonsful. Whatever."

"I do. The average spoonful is almost 15 ccs."

"So the American exaggeration is fifty percent larger than the English exaggeration. I'd have never guessed."

"If you need a moment to gather yourself, I can wait," he said. "And for the record, 'Loving Spoonful' refers to Mississippi John Hurt's first sip of morning coffee, his loving spoonful of Maxwell House. Another faulty legend."

"Just what the world needs," she said, "a myth-busting rock'n'roll fact checker."

"It's the lawyer in me."

"Just tell me the truth. Is Elvis really dead?"

"To the best of my knowledge, yes."

"I suspected as much. If you don't mind, I'm not going to ask about how the Sex Pistols and Pussy Riot got their names."

"I understand," he said, feigning a sadness that made her laugh.

"Thank goodness you aren't a numbers guy who knows off the top of his head how much jism is contained in 200 million orgasms times 3 to 4 cc's."

"Split the difference, call it 3 point 5 cc's, which comes to 700 million cc's, which comes to almost 185,000 gallons, more or less."

"Oh, my god," she murmured.

"It's about 28 percent of a single Olympic-size swimming pool."

"You did the math."

"I may have a touch of OCD."

"I think it's time for a pun about why Mark Spitz," she said.

He groaned. "That's going to leave a bruise."

"So let me get this right. Every week or so, you guys fill two Olympic swimming pools. Is that about right?"

"I couldn't have put it better myself," he said, “but let's think about this: How many of those 200 million women had orgasms?”

She was silent.

“Troubling, isn't it? Think about the world, not just the United States. Think about China, India, all those countries in Africa. Think about South America. Think about the Middle East. Think about how awful the plight of women is in many parts of the world. So let's ask, out of 400 million sex acts every day, how many were consensual? How many were out-and-out forcible rapes, and how many more were instances where the man just assumes it's his natural right and the woman just goes along with it, it's her quote duty unquote, because that's what a woman does in her culture, whatever it may be.

“Let's put it another way. How many of the 400 million sex acts performed today were generally pleasurable for both parties? When I ask this, I'm thinking about poor people the world over, who live in various levels of poverty. They live in huts, in shacks, in god knows what kind of conditions, and yet they fuck, too, just like everyone else, and we know this is true because it's where babies come from and the world's population is expanding. So there must be one hell of a lot of fucking going on and men ejaculating. But what is the quality of all that sex? I can't comprehend it. If you live seven in a tiny one-room hovel, when and how do you fuck at all? But people do.

“I was reading a novel a few years ago, a lot of which was set in Hong Kong and Macao. It mentioned, almost in passing, that there were several clans of Chinese, tribes, ethnic subgroups, I guess, who were called 'boat people.' They lived on junks and sampans, and that was their entire life and livelihood and existence. They cooked on the boats, slept on the boats, lived their lives on the boats, and hardly ever set foot on dry land. Some never did. That's about all the book mentioned and then it moved back to the main plotline. But I got hooked on the idea of these boat people, and living their entire lives that way. What's it like? When puberty hits, when a boy is, say twelve or thirteen or whatever. How does he fall in love? How does he find a girl he likes? Are marriages arranged? What do the girls think and feel? What is sex like? Do they know lots of positions and techniques, or only one or two? How is sexual information transmitted? How do you fuck when your entire family is about eight feet away, on the other side of your sampan? What is the quality of that sex? How many positions do they know and use? Is there a lot of foreplay? Is there any foreplay at all? Do they snuggle afterward on that tiny, crowded sampan? In fact, is any part of their sex comparable in any way to our modern, western understanding of it? I have no idea.

“Eskimos. We call them Inuits or Alaska Natives, now, and I'm fine with that. So you live in a sod hut or an igloo somewhere above the Arctic Circle. Or Mongolians in yurts in Outer Mongolia. All those poor Russians in Siberia. Finns and Norwegians. Any place where it's horribly cold most of the year. Do men and women who live way up there without electricity ever get totally naked? Do they know what each other's genitals even look like? If it's 10 below zero outside and 50 degrees inside, does he go down on her? She's lying there with her legs in the air or spread out, does he leisurely spend twenty minutes licking her out? Do they even have cunnilingus and blowjobs? Not if it's 50 degrees they don't. Extreme climate must have a major influence on how people over the millennia conducted their sex lives.

“So we go back to the big picture again, 7 billion people on the planet, a little less than 3.5 billion men and a little more than 3.5 billion women, but let's stick with round numbers. Three and a half billion women. How many of them in the totality of their lives never, ever, not once had a good carpet-munching, some good cunnilingus to orgasm? How many of them, do you think, might not even know what cunnilingus is, that it even exists? Forget the planet, let's just think about the United States. More than 300 million people. A hundred fifty million women. Let's say one-third are 16 or younger, and one-third are, oh, 45 and older. That leaves 50 million women, right this moment, in this country, who are presumably chronologically old enough to be sexually active, and sure, there's women over 45 who are, but I'm just trying to keep it simple. So 50 million, right? How many have ever had multiple orgasms in a single session of lovemaking? I wouldn't even begin to be able to guess.”

“But a pretty small percentage, I suspect,” she said.

“Yes, absolutely. And the 50 million we've decided are 45 or older. How many are still sexually active, and how many back in the day got head from a guy who knew what he was doing?”

“Four,” she said. He laughed. “Not counting lesbians and bisexuals,” she added.

“Right, exactly,” he said. "But even then some lesbians don't enjoy oral sex. Some don't like penetration. There's a category of lesbian called a stone butch, a woman who never receives but only gives sex.”

“And then there's the opposite, women who only want to receive lesbian sex," she said. "They call them pillow queens.”

"There's probably some lesbians who don't like any kind of sex at all. There's heterosexual women who feel that way, so I suppose there's some lesbians who don't either. But back to the big picture. The thing about bean-counting and numbers-crunching is that the size of the gay and lesbian community is small. Everybody's numbers vary all over, but just for argument, let's say six percent, half men and half women. If we're talking about 50 million women of sexually active age, it doesn't matter statistically very much what a small group of them – say, stone butches or pillow queens or lipstick lesbians, do or don't do. They aren't going to affect the overall average much. So even if every single lesbian among our 50 million has had at least one fantastic orgasm from cunnilingus, it won't sway the overall average noticeably.

“Especially since we have no idea what the number might be anyway.”

“Right. Three point five billion women in the world. How many will never ever take a nice, long, leisurely shower with their husbands, boyfriends, girlfriends, lovers, significant others?”

“Are we coming around to blowjobs?” she asked.

“You know me so well. Yes, we are. Three point five billion men in the world. How many, what percentage, will be born, live and die without ever once getting a quality blowjob? How many – now I mean males who live past the age of, say, 20, who don't die in childhood – how many will never even know what a blowjob is? Do blowjobs and pussy-licking exist in all cultures? I have no idea, but I suspect not. I mean, picture this. You're the wife of some Taliban fighter in the hills of Afghanistan or some god-forsaken place. What's that culture like, for a woman, for a wife? Does he come home on weekends and play slap-and-tickle with the missus? Do you think ISIS fighters give their wives good head? Cuddle, afterward?

"Back in pioneer times, all those wagon trains heading west with good, god-fearing Christians. How many women cried out during reverse cowgirl around the campfire? Just how wild was Wild Bill Hickok, and did Calamity Jane own a dildo?"

“Back in the 1960s and 1970s there were articles and discussions about people here in America having sex and the only thing they knew about was the missionary position. If you were born in Iowa or Georgia or New Mexico and the only thing you know about fucking is that the guy is on top and the woman has to be on the bottom, well, that's pretty sad. To me it implies that the couple knows nothing about foreplay, about oral or anal sex, about just having fun.

"I sometimes think about my high school graduating class. Most of us guys never heard about blowjobs, because we never talked about them. My guess is that if one of the guys did know, he kept it to himself. All we knew about or talked about was fucking. So then I think about the girls. As we learned to say from the Watergate hearings, what did they know and when did they know it? They knew about sex in general, because we had health class, very rudimentary sex education, boys all in one class, and the girls in the other. Mommy and Daddy go in the bedroom and the penis goes in the vagina, and then these tiny little man cells swim up this channel and one of them gets to stick himself to a gargantuan beach ball.

“We heard stories the girls watched movies about menstruation. We guys just got the lecture about how babies were made, and nobody ever told us about the monthlies because we had no need to know. But I'd sure like to take a poll of all the girls I graduated with. How many of them ever heard of cunnilingus? We didn't know about blowjobs, so I can't imagine any of them knew about getting their pussies licked. But at some point after graduation, in college or when the girls started getting married, at some point some of them learned that there was such as thing. How many, what percentage? When did they learn? And how? And what did they think of it? How many liked it, or came to like it? How many were disgusted by the idea, and never learned to like it? When did they learn about blowjobs?”

“Can't forget those blowjobs,” Karen said.

“Absolutely not. Anyway, how many, what percentage of them learned to give blowjobs, what percentage liked them and what percentage didn't? Of the 200 girls in my high school class, how many eventually learned to like regular in-and-out sex? What percentage enjoyed it, what percentage got married and just learned to put up with it? How many liked cunnilingus? How many ever got good head, at least once?"

"Four," she said.

Walter laughed. "I suppose so. Here's another numbers question. For decades in American culture we've had this notion that a woman should and would remain virginal until her wedding night, right? So let's ask, during all those long decades, centuries, maybe, of the concept of the virginal bride, what percentage do we think truly were virgins on their wedding nights? I have no idea. I couldn't even wing a guess. But I bet a lot of them were, given this country's puritan religious origins. Okay, over the past 200 years, how many couples had their first sex on their wedding nights? And what percentage of those wedded, blissful consummations were pleasurable, were good sex, maybe even great sex, and what percentage do you think were disasters? What are the odds that two 18-year-olds, or two 20-year-olds, or whatever, who have no sex manuals, no books, no porn movies, no porn of any kind, are likely to get something as complex and nuanced and idiosyncratic as sex anywhere close to 'right' on their very first shot out of the box?"

"What percentage are likely to get it right the first time even if they aren't married?"

“Exactly. To me it's mind-boggling. And another mind-boggler, and if you want to talk about abominations, this one is truly an abomination. There's cultures in the world that practice female circumcision. I have great difficulty just wrapping my head around that fact. There's so much poverty in the world, so much misery, that even asking if a woman has had a good clit-licking is just ... well, I don't know. Absurd? Crazy? Just so completely irrelevant. They use female circumcision to make sure the woman gets no pleasure. I can think of no words to characterize that except ‘barbaric’ followed by 'insane.'”

"And remember my question, how many women will never take a nice, long, leisurely shower with their husbands, boyfriends, lovers, significant others? This gets tremendously complicated because of all the implicit assumptions. It presumes, among other things, indoor plumbing."

"Or at least pretty good outdoor plumbing, a reliable water supply and presumably clean water --"

"-- reasonably good weather, a certain amount of privacy --"

"-- the actual fact of leisure time, a time when a man and a woman can actually bathe together --"

"-- cultural questions and issues, such as bathing customs and practices, and how men and women relate to each other --"

"— historical questions, and how people, even rich people, bathed--"

“I don't want to be Debbie Downer, here,” she said, “but don't you think that if we think about this stuff too much, we'll go mad? I think I would.”

“Maybe."

"Slight change of subject, but speaking of good sex, blowjobs and cunnilingus, I always thought oral sex was the best kind of sex," Karen said.

"You mean in terms of pleasure?"

"Well, maybe that, too. But I meant in terms of – what would be the right word? – maybe 'altruism,' I guess. And generosity."

"Okay. Explain, please."

"Well, in oral sex, straight, gay or lesbian doesn't matter, the person performing the act very nearly always has the other person's pleasure in mind, and not their own. The goal of oral sex is to give your partner an orgasm – very nearly always, anyway – and not yourself. There's probably some cases where that might not be so --"

"A guy doing it for a few minutes only so his girlfriend will give him points for giving it a try, and so he can get his blowjob."

"Right. And there's times a woman gives head for a few minutes so she can say she did it, and now let's move on to the fucking, Harry."

"Yes."

"But look at the act itself. Oral sex, taken to its conclusion, is designed to give the other person an orgasm, to give pleasure, even if the giver doesn't much like doing it. I'm doing this for you, darling, I'm not doing it for me. I think that makes it different from most other sex acts."

"That's a great point," Walter said. "I had never looked at it that way before."

"Consider intercourse," she said. "Sure, sometimes the guy wants to give the girl an orgasm, but how often is that true? Not often, I'd say."

"I agree. Sometimes, maybe, but not very often. Most of the time the guy wants to get to his own orgasm. Hers is usually secondary, or even non-existent."

"Right. Here’s the bottom line, another no pun intended. Oral sex is generally designed to give the partner pleasure, an orgasm. Intercourse is designed to give the guy his own pleasure, period. But there's other reasons for intercourse," she said, "like when we talked about people who think it exists mainly or solely for procreation, for making babies. I suppose that's altruistic. But if your goal is to make a baby, only the guy has to orgasm. The gal can just lie there and look at the ceiling."

"Usually, yes. One can argue that sometimes people think they are doing it to fulfill some religious or cultural reason, making big families. And nowadays you sometime read about young guys who deliberately try to knock up a girl and make her pregnant, even though he has no desire to be a father in a committed relationship with her. In his sub-culture it's just a perverted notion of manhood. Look at me: I knocked up three bitches. I refuse to use condoms. I refuse to support them financially."

"Yes. And sometimes you read about rape in warfare, the invaders raping and gang-raping women partly as some sort of twisted political agenda, some terror tactic or revenge tactic, Nazi troops raping Russian women, and then when the Russians turned the tide and attacked Germany, raping German women. There was a lot of it in Serbia, all that ethnic cleansing business. And I've read about those tribal wars in Africa, too, one tribe attacking another and maiming or killing the men and raping the women."

"Yes, those are horrible events. Rape in general is horrible enough, and then some people attach an agenda too it. But the thing about rape – maybe any kind of rape – is that a lot of experts say it really isn't even about sex at all, it's about power and violence."

"Yes, I know, I agree. I've been in women's group meetings where we talk about that. But here's what I propose: Since we agree that kind of thing, rape, rape for whatever reason, really isn't about sex, let's exclude it from our discussion. Let's assume everything we're talking about is consensual."

"Okay, done. Can we get back to blowjobs now?"

"No," she said, laughing. "One more thing. Remember we were talking about how intercourse is largely for the fucker's pleasure, not the fuckee?"

"Vividly."

That made her laugh. "Do you know the main exception to that statement?"

"Let me think … no. Tell me."

"A lesbian with a strap-on."

"Right! Because the point of that sex act is for the receiver to have an orgasm, not the giver."

"There you go. Although they say the woman wearing the strap-on might cum, too, because sometimes it rubs against your clit and you both get off."

"Uh, hmm. Can I ask a question?"

"No. But I'll tell you anyway, before you ask. Yes, I have. Both as fucker and as fuckee. Or strapper-on-er and strapee. Whatever. Not a lot, but a few times, often enough to know what I'm talking about. It's not my very favorite thing, but yes, it's in my repertoire, and I like it. It's in my tricks bag of tricks, as we sex professionals like to say."

"That's a terrible double entendre," he said, "but fair enough."

"And here's another of your unknowable numbers: The O Ratio. The ratio of men's orgasms to women's orgasms, in a lifetime. In America. On different continents. In the world. Per year. Per age cohort. Per religion. Per culture, per mega-culture, say east versus west, Third-World versus whoever you want. Ranked by education level. By income. By historical eras. Boomers versus millennials."

"Jesus," he murmured.

"Now, back to oral sex."

"Oh, thank God."

She laughed again. "Another reason why oral sex is more altruistic than fucking. We've all heard of grudge fucks and revenge fucks, and even pity fucks, right? And hate fucks, even. But have you ever in your life ever heard of a revenge blowjob? A grudge blowjob? Or even a pity blowjob? And if there even was such a thing and he was getting a grudge blowjob, would the guy care? I'd venture to say, not in a million years."

He grinned, nodding his head.

"And likewise," she said, "have you ever heard of a grudge rug-munching? Revenge split-licking. A pity pussy-eating? A get-even rim job? How about a hate blowjob? In all of human history, have you ever heard of invaders killing the men and going down on the women? It's my opinion that oral sex is nearly always done for a positive reason, a good reason, even if the do-er really likes doing it to the do-ee. I wish your legal team had done a little more work on making grudge cunnilingus a viable alternative to giving a woman a black eye or a split lip."

"Me, too, but you have to admit, grudge cunnilingus is a tough sell.”

“I prefer to think of it as a marketing challenge, like the Peekytoe crab and the Chilean sea bass.”

“Speaking of altruism, it occurs to me that a pity fuck is altruistic," he said, "if the intention is to give the receiver an orgasm."

"Well, yes, I suppose that's true. And I think it would be the really rare -- and really special – guy who would deliver a pity carpet-munching. A guy like you, maybe, but you're one in three point five billion. But do you see my overall point about oral sex?"

"Absolutely. You're entirely correct. And thank you for the compliment, but I'm not sure I'm worthy."

"Oh, you would, you know you would. I think I've learned enough about you in the last day or so. If a gal needed a little self-esteem pick-me-up, you'd be the go-to guy, your marriage notwithstanding. And speaking of oral gratification and good things to eat," she said, "I figured out where I want to go for dinner. It's a little unusual, and it'll take an hour or so to get there."

"That's no problem," he said. "Should we head back to the hotel to change?"

"That's the best part – we're dressed fine for dinner just the way we are. The place I'm thinking of is pretty informal."

"I can do informal," he said. "I’m a Mr. Pot Roast self-esteem pick-me-up kind of guy. Where are we going?"

"Can we do like last night? It'll be my secret until we get there?"

"Sure. Want to flag down a cab?"

"Or we could take the subway. We're almost at 57th, we can take the F train. You're the guy who wanted to know what it felt like to be a commuting New Yorker. Since we’re talking about strap-ons, want to be a strap-hanger for a while?"

"We’re taking the F train?"

"Effing A we are," she said, smiling.

“You have to love a town that has an F train,” he said.

**Saturday Evening**

When they came up the stairs out of the subway station on Stillwell Avenue Walter looked around. "So this is Coney Island," he said. "I've never actually been here before. I've heard about it and read about it all my life, of course. This is fun, something else to cross off my bucket list. I bet I know where we're going for dinner."

"There can be only one place," Karen said as they walked south toward the boardwalk and the Atlantic Ocean.

"Nathan's Famous," he said. "The one, the only. The original."

"Another of your shrines?"

"Without a doubt. I've had Nathan's hot dogs before, but not from the original site, Coney Island. I feel like I should remove my shoes. We're on holy ground again."

"You said you were a meatloaf-and-pot-roast kind of guy, all-American comfort food, Katz's deli, pastrami-and-Swiss on rye. Coffee and a Danish on the Staten Island ferry. I have the feeling if you ran into the pope at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, you'd both go out for lox and bagels and talk about Springsteen all night."

"That's true. And I heartily approve of your dinner choice. The restaurant, the neighborhood, the ambience. The smells, the ocean, the creosote from the boardwalk, the popcorn and cotton candy, the noise from the roller coaster, and all the kids in the amusement park over there. Do they still have a carousel? Bumper cars?"

"They do," she said.

"I can see the Ferris wheel from here. Are you okay with heights? That's something I’d like to do after dinner."

"I'm your gal," she said.

And then they were at the intersection of Stillwell and Surf Avenues, and there across the street was Nathan's. "Let me just stand here and take it all in," he said. "Did you know Nathan's stock is traded on NASDAQ?"

"No, I didn't," she laughed. "But I'm not surprised you'd come up with a fact like that. They almost got wiped out during Hurricane Sandy. The water right here was six feet deep. Coney Island was hit bad, nearly wiped out. Nathan's was closed for one of the few times in its entire history, and they did a major renovation that took seven months. They even re-started a clam bar, which had closed down in the 1950's, and a delicatessen. They have shrimp, clams, crab meat. I read they hired seven clam shuckers. You can buy a glass of wine here. The day they re-opened it made all the local TV news reports. "

"Wine, shrimp cocktail and a Nathan's footlong with the works," he said. "It doesn't get any better than this."

* * *

“If your friend Jules LeClos finds out where we ate dinner tonight you're a dead man,” Karen said as they walked slowly down the boardwalk, digesting their footlongs.

“I don't know about dead, but I'm pretty sure they'll never let me into France ever again,” Walter said. “Okay, tell me what you know about this Ferris wheel.”

It was located two blocks down from Nathan's, and they took the long way to get there, walking down to the ocean and then walking along the boardwalk past Ruby's Bar & Grill, and then entering the amusement park from its boardwalk entrance.

“As it happens, I know quite a lot about it. We used to come here all the time when I was a kid. The Ferris wheel is now owned by a company founded by a Greek guy named Denos, and they call it Deno's Wonder Wheel. Woody Allen even made a movie about it. Being a guy fascinated with holy ground, you will be impressed to know that it sits on the site of the old Luna Park amusement park from way back when.”

“That was here, huh?”

“Yes, from 12th down to 8th Street, that was the old Luna Park. It burned down I think during World War II, and then over the years people have kept on rebuilding amusement parks here, and now there's still a Luna Park, but it's not really the same as the old original one. Although the Ferris wheel itself is still the original one, from 1920 or thereabouts, and it's a protected historical landmark. Ninety-five years old, but still the best ride in Coney Island. Not only that, it's a pretty rare type, too.”

“How so?”

“There's only three like it in the world, this one, and two replicas. Disney has one in California and there's a copy in Japan somewhere.”

“I know a lot about the very first Ferris wheel, because it was in Chicago, my old home town, at the 1893 World's Fair,” Walter said, “but I confess that's about all I know about Ferris wheels. Why is this one the unique granddaddy?”

“All the other Ferris wheels have their cars, or capsules, or gondolas, or whatever, in fixed positions on the outside rim, right? But this one has eight fixed gondola cars attached to the outside rim that are painted white. Those fixed gondolas are considered to be for the scaredy-cats. They hang and sway, of course, but they don't go anywhere except around. Then it also has sixteen gondolas that slide in and out from the outer rim to an inner rim. Those are painted blue and red, and those are for the bold, adventurous types. So it's called an ‘eccentric’ Ferris wheel type because of that. There's two different lines,” she said. “You pick the line for the fixed gondolas, or the line for the sliding ones. Each one holds six people, if they are small.”

“Which has the better view?”

“The non-sliding ones. The movable ones make it like a constant roller coaster. And that's not counting all the jerking and lurching when it stops and starts to unload. The good news is you go around twice on each ride.”

“Well, I don't know about you, but I'm all about the view from the top.”

“Sounds good to me,” she said.

When they went to the ticket booth Walter bought twelve tickets.

“Are we staying the night?” Karen asked, which made him laugh.

“You know that saying, you only go around once in life? Well, we're going around twice. If each gondola holds six people, I'm buying us privacy for two rides.”

“Ah, I see,” she said. “They say it’s always better the second time.”

“Are we still talking about Ferris wheels, or are we back to sex again?”

“Don't we always seem to get back to it?”

“You have a point,” he said. They got into the line for fixed gondolas and after a few minutes they were ushered into their gondola. The attendant didn't seem fazed when Walter handed him tickets for two rides; it was Coney Island, and he'd seen it all before.

“He probably thinks we're going to have sex during the ride,” Karen said when they were in the gondola, sitting and strapped in.

“Joining the 150-Feet-High Club? Doesn't sound like all that much of a challenge,” Walter said.

The Ferris wheel started to move and they rose a few feet up in the air as the next car was loaded.

"I've been thinking about something," Karen said.

"What's that?"

"You know how you were talking about the generational disconnect over blowjobs, how your generation thought BJs were the Holy Grail, and then about how young people today think they aren't even real sex?"

"Yes?"

"Well, suppose the kids today are right. Suppose blowjobs, and cunnilingus, too, aren't such a big deal. Maybe they -- I guess I should say ‘we’ -- are right to regard oral sex as a lesser form of sex, not quite as serious because the whole procreation thing is removed from the equation. Maybe our mothers and grandmothers were wrong, Maybe BJs aren't especially icky and nasty and perverted. Maybe they're no big deal, in the ballpark with handjobs and finger-fucking. Some intermediate stage between third base and home plate."

"Third-and-a-half base?"

The gondolas moved, then stopped again to load the next car.

"Sure, why not? It's only a metaphor, there's nothing sacred about three bases and home. Maybe there's five bases and home. And if she comes twice, two home runs in one at bat. See? The baseball metaphor doesn't really work very well when there's two people involved, not just the batter. And baseball's a man's metaphor anyway, not a woman's metaphor."

"Point taken."

"And maybe it's partly why teen abortions are down, and teen pregnancies are down. Kids are doing more of Plan B, and less of Plan A. It's not exactly an alternative to birth control, but maybe that's what's happening. We know intercourse can have serious, unintended consequences: Sometimes girls get knocked up, and then they have babies or abortions. We know abstinence doesn't work, it was always an untenable solution. I agree 14-year-olds shouldn't be handing out BJs, but that's because they shouldn't be having any kind of sex or semi-sex--”

“Semi-sex? I like it. Copyright it first thing in the morning.”

“Thank you, counselor, I will. Where was I? Oh, right, the varieties of religious experience. Maybe the specific kind of sex is purely secondary, maybe even totally irrelevant. Who says baby-making intercourse is somehow superior to non-baby-making sex? If baby-making is the goal, sure. But if orgasm and giving your partner pleasure are the goals, and assuming consent, then who cares what method you use, cock-in-pussy, tongue-in-pussy, fingers-in-pussy or sex-toy-in-pussy? An orgasm doesn’t care where it comes from, or who is giving it to you, what positions you used, what position you wound up in when you came. Straight or gay, a blowjob is just a blowjob. Straight or lesbian, eating pussy is just eating pussy. Isn’t that what you and your law firm have been fighting for all these years? That it’s wrong to demonize one kind of sex and hold another kind up with a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval?”

"So Granny was wrong, but Monica had it right. BJs are no big deal. Writ large."

"Pretty much. Need a minute to wrap your head around it?"

"Yes, I think I do."

"It's not about Granny and Monica, but it is about generations and generational change. You've said it yourself a dozen ways: There was a Sexual Revolution, and you were one of the revolutionary leaders, the sex Robespierre, the sex Trotsky, Patrick Henry or John Adams, pick your favorite flavor. It was a long, tough fight, but your side won. Right?"

The Ferris wheel had reached the top of its orbit. They looked through the wire-protected windows.

"Quite a view," Walter said. "Let me get oriented. Long Island's out that way, to the east. Manhattan's that way beyond the houses, to the north, across the East River. Most of America is that way, to the west, across lower New York Bay."

"The Promised Land," Karen said. "Where BJs are no longer perverted felonies, so you don’t have to beg for them with bail money in your wallet. Where black people and white people are legally free to marry each other. Where gays can marry each other. Where eating pussy isn’t a crime, it’s an appetizer. Butt sex is okay for those who like it and a penis can be real or a strap-on. Where you can go online and see what clits look like, in all their gorgeous varieties, each one as individual as a fingerprint. That was you, Walter, you and your colleagues. You all helped make that happen."

Walter looked out the window of the gondola toward the setting sun. "And yet," he said. "And yet."

"And yet it's still not a perfect world."

"No," he said. "Not by a long shot. Not even close." The Ferris wheel started to move again. “You realize that I’m 40 years older than you?”

“Is that significant?”

“Well, the number, 40. Moses and the Children of Israel wandered in the desert for 40 years, but it wasn’t because that’s how far they had to travel, or that they didn’t have Google Maps. The reason was it took that long for the old generation born under slavery to die out, and that only the new generation could go forward into the Promised Land. The old generation had to die out, and only Moses, alone, could stand on that mountaintop, it was called Mount Nebo, and look upon Canaan, the Promised Land, from a distance. It means that even 3,000 years ago, they knew that for societal change to happen, the older generation and its biases and prejudices have to die out, and that only the new generation could go forth into the future."

"The bible says that? That’s why Moses couldn’t go?"

"No. It says Moses and Aaron were being punished for some minor infraction. And it says the reason the Children of Israel couldn’t go, only their offspring, was because they were bad. They were being punished, too."

“Sounds harsh. That’s how you treat your Chosen People?”

“God in that part of the bible isn’t a very nice guy. He mellowed as he got older, as a lot of us do, though, and a couple hundred years later He’s fawning all over a murderous adulterer and lecher named King David.”

"Maybe God was a She, and She liked bad boys, like a lot of women do. So anyway Moses does all that work – he foments a revolution, leads thousands of escapees, drowns the Pharaoh's army, guides the Israelites for 40 years, brings back the 10 Commandments from the mountain, writes all the laws and rules and regulations -- he does all this heavy lifting on God's behalf for what, half a century, and just as he's about to cross the finish line, God yanks him over for a broken tail light?"

"That's what it says on paper, but a lot of people think it was the generational thing. The Promised Land was for the new generation, one that wasn't born under slavery. If that's correct, it means that this new world of sexual freedom and choice that you and your generation live in, or are going to be living in pretty soon, that’s the future. And the old people like me and my generation, we aren’t allowed to go there, although not because we were all bad. I can only go to the mountaintop, and stare off at it, shimmering in the distance. Like New York, over there.”

“And you like what you see? Or you don’t like it?”

“The first problem is, we conflated 'Promised Land' with 'Paradise,' but in fact they aren't the same place, by a longshot. The Promised Land wasn't the Garden of Eden, never mind the real estate sales pitch Moses got about milk and honey.

"Do I like what I see? I like some of it, and I’ m envious of a good deal of it. I like that people can talk about sex openly. I like that you can go on Wikipedia and look up ‘clitoris’ and there’s this nice, concise, intelligent and informative article with a good diagram. Did you know the damn thing is shaped like a chubby wishbone? It is. It’s like an upside-down letter Y, and that little pea-shaped ball that sticks out under the hood, that’s only the tip of the iceberg, so to speak and mixing my metaphors. But the clitoris runs down underneath the vaginal lips on each side, did you know that? I’ve lived on this earth for six and a half decades and had no idea the clitoris was shaped like that until recently. No idea whatsoever. And not only did I not know it, nobody else in my generation – nobody else in human history -- did either until after the Bicentennial in 1976. I had 20 years of the very best education that money can buy, kindergarten to law school and the bar exam, and the word ‘clitoris’ was never mentioned one single time, can you believe it? An Italian named Realdo Colombo, a professor of anatomy, was the first guy to correctly identify the clitoris as a sexual organ in 1559, but then nobody did anything about it for the next four hundred years until Masters and Johnson discovered its shape in the 1970s, after I graduated from college. How could that be? In all of human history, and since they first seriously started cutting up cadavers for medical study a couple hundred years ago, how could mankind not have known this? It’s not like the damn thing is microscopic or anything. It’s right there, smack dab in the middle of just about the finest piece of human real estate on the face of the earth. Literally speaking, it’s right there in your face when you learn to like that sort of thing. And until a few years ago when somebody posted it on the internet hardly anybody knew what it looked like. Some 22-year-old German kid in Berlin discovered the Islets of Langerhans making insulin inside the pancreas a hundred and fifty years ago, four years after the Civil War, did you know that? But the clit? For 500 years, half a millennium, it’s been MIA. And what kind of 22-year-old pervert cares more about the pancreas than the pussy? But apparently he did. Anyway, it turns out your clit is shaped like a wishbone. I mean, how incredibly wonderful is that? How perfect! And the word ‘wishbone’ -- they squandered a perfectly terrific word on a chicken skeleton instead of a woman’s lamb pie.”

“I notice you guys haven’t had any trouble over the centuries finding your dicks.”

“I suspect that’s a large part of the answer, flat-out medical sexism. Guy anatomy was important, girl anatomy wasn’t. I mean, if it is only the guy’s orgasm that counts, and it doesn’t matter if the girl cums, then no, her anatomy isn’t important, either, outside of babymaking, which we've established can occur orgasmlessly, if that's a word. Or clitorislessly, if you prefer. Clit-free. When I was in college, they were still debating how many types and what kinds of orgasms women could have, and whether there even was such a thing as a vaginal orgasm, or was every female orgasm just the one type, clitoral. They were discussing clitoral orgasms with no idea what the damned thing actually looked like.”

“Let’s recap. Male anatomy was worth studying, but female anatomy wasn’t. Male homosexuality was worth criminalizing, but nobody cared about criminalizing female homosexuality, because, of course, it was silly females doing girly things. Wow, who saw that one coming.”

“I for one am gob-smacked.”

“Right. And by the way, I want to say ‘clitorislessly’ fast three times,” she said. “Clitorislessly, clitoris..lisky...clitor, oh, the hell with it.”

The gondola started its descent.

“You asked what I liked about the way it is now,” he said. “I like some of the new ideas and some of the new relationships people have now. I like the concepts of fuckbuddies and friends with benefits, hooking up. I like the idea of LUGs, ‘Lesbians Until Graduation,’ and other new forms your generation has invented. I like the word and the idea of ‘bicurious,’ that you can have a little elbow room, a little slack, trying to figure out what you are. So to answer your question, yes, there are lots of things about the new age of sexual freedom and knowledge and choice that I like and approve of. But there are lots of things I don’t like and don’t approve of at all. They fall under what a sociologist called the Law of Unintended Consequences. I don't like 14-year-old girls giving blowjobs, I don't even like them knowing about them, which totally contradicts my general belief that every kid should have quality sex education classes."

"So ... at what age should a teenager learn about sex?"

"I'm a big fan of internal consistency -- but I have no idea. It's deceptively complicated. You start with the biological stuff, the basic mechanics, that’s easy. The penis goes in the vagina, there's ejaculation, you talk about sperm and eggs and how pregnancy occurs. Use lots of diagrams, with the parts all labeled. But that’s all just biology. It's anatomy and plumbing. When and how do you tell them about foreplay? About cunnilingus? About quality and skill instead of mechanics and piping? About variations and ranges and propensities, not to mention dysfunctions and problems. How do you tell a class of pimply high schools boys that a lot of girls prefer doggie style instead of missionary? That if you're a guy and you want to be a _good_ guy, and you want to get a blowjob every now and then, you're pretty well going to have to learn to give her some head, and learn to like it, and to do a good job. Where does that enter the curriculum? Hell if I know. When do you tell teenage boys that it's not optimal strategy to just bang away in the missionary position, climax, pull out leaving her high and dry, and then roll over and go to sleep? When and how do you tell them about homosexuality, and even more important, how do you tell them it's okay if that’s your thing? Do you tell them what kinds of sex gays can have, especially lesbians? Boy, those ladies have a smorgasbord of choices. I bet if you used the word ‘tribbing’ in 1980 less than two percent of the population had ever heard of it, lots of lesbians included. Has the National Spelling Bee ever had the words 'tribadism,' 'gamahuche,' 'soixent-neuf' or 'cunnilingus' in it? The words ‘fourchette’ and ‘perineum’ were never in any spelling bee I ever took part in. ‘Perineum. Could you use that in a sentence please? Okay, perineum. Pee, Eee, Arr.’ Or how about this. ‘Jism. Gee, eye, zee, em.’ ‘Sorry, sit down, please.’”

“When and how do you tell kids that orientation can be fluid, that it seems to be more fluid in women than men? That it’s possible to not even know what your orientation is, or that it may take years to discover what you are, or that it seems for a woman it can flow back and forth? How do you find a nice, calm, politically correct way to tell straight kids as well as gay kids that all the bigotry and religious nonsense they hear from their parents, their elders, especially their church-going elders, is bullshit?”

“Don’t trust sex advice from anybody over 30?”

“That’s just about the size of it, yes.”

The gondola was nearly at the bottom of its orbit.

“You know what I regret? That when I was in college and became sexually active, that I didn't learn how to perform cunnilingus. To give good head, in other words. I didn't even learn it in my marriage, because by the time the information was widely available, it was too late for me, for the men of my generation. But I sincerely believe, if I was having a birds-and-the bees talk with my son, or any young man in his teens, that's what I would tell him: The secret to life, my boy, is to learn how to give good head to a woman. It'll pay dividends a hundred times over.”

Karen laughed, and he smiled. Their gondola reached the bottom of the loop and started back up again.

"You know where I learned nearly everything of value about women and sex? _Penthouse_ magazine. First time young men of my generation ever saw pubic hair, at least in a magazine--”

“And maybe outside of a magazine.”

“True. Then vaginas, and what they really look like, what colors they are. Then two women having sex. Then what an anus looked like. What clits look like, at least from the outside. That there are inner lips and outer lips. God knows, no high school ever taught that to anybody. And then the _Penthouse_ letters columns, where we learned it was okay to do this stuff, and how to do it. Not just okay, but good. Terrific. That it was okay to like looking at lesbians going down on each other, and a valuable teaching aid for men, ironically. And then next thing you know there's half a dozen magazines available in 7-11s and newsstands all over the country, _Club_ , and _Hustler_ and lots of others. _Playgirl_ , with pictures of naked guys with two kinds of penises, straight and cut, plus the variables, thick, thin, straight, bent, different colorations, just like vaginas have different colorations. Quality, classiness, soft-core, all began to plummet, of course. Next thing you know, there's adult bookstores selling VHS and Beta videos, magazines, books, sex toys, the whole megillah. Where else was a guy going to learn what a pussy looked like? Where else was a girl going to see what shapes, sizes, and colors dicks came in? Skin mags, that’s where. Sure, there were dirty books and dirty photos and dirty French postcards long before _Playboy_ and _Penthouse_ , but the difference is access. The French postcards were hard to find, and only certain bookstores had back rooms, and no kid ever went into them. _Playboy_ and _Playgirl_ and _Penthouse_ , and many of the others, though, were sold openly in every 7-11 and Barnes and Noble from sea to shining sea.

“There were outliers, though. There always are. There's a guy wrote a book in 1969 called _Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask_. It was the first sex manual that hit it big with the general public, it was a number one bestseller here and in dozens of foreign countries. It was the first one to dismiss the notion that women had two kinds of orgasm, vaginal and clitoral. A few years later, out comes _The Joy of Sex_ , with lots of illustrations, very arty and soft-core. Tasteful, in a 1970s way. It had Indian art, Japanese erotica, pen-and-ink drawings and color paintings. The man has long hair and a full beard, clearly a man of the 1970s, and the woman doesn't shave under her arms. And it's clear they are in love. The strange thing is, it was based on _The Joy of Cooking_ , so it has food-inspired chapter titles and uses a lot of cooking imagery."

"That is a little weird."

"It might have been weird, but it was brilliant marketing. Sex made as familiar as your kitchen appliances, reliable, simple to operate, homey, warm, healthy, accessible, widely available, friendly, non-threatening, and it tastes good. Sex as comfort food, not something rare and exotic."

"Sex as meatloaf," she said, "sex as pot roast for the meat-and-potatoes guy and gal. So that's what's in the Land of Milk and Honey. Getting jiggy with comfort food and _Penthouse_ magazine."

He laughed. “You asked what I liked and didn’t like about what I see from the mountaintop. I have a major problem with pornography, but not at all in the way a lot of people do. From the point of view of a detriment to society, the problem with pornography isn't the content; it isn't sex, at least in the main. Its problems are excess, access, and attitude. There's just too damn much of it, and it has permeated far too deeply into society. It's like alcohol and marijuana. A little of it in moderation is fine, but if you're talking about alcohol, too much of it will kill you. And some people simply can't handle it, but that doesn’t mean it should be illegal, any more than a bottle of scotch should be illegal just because some people are alcoholics. Marijuana won't kill you, but if you walk around all day stoned out of your mind, well, that's like being drunk all the time, too. I don't think 14-year-olds should be using alcohol, smoking marijuana, or looking at pornography. Fourteen-year-old girls shouldn't be giving blowjobs, but that genie has jumped out of the bottle, and the genie problem is you can never put one back.”

"You said there was a problem with attitude."

"Yes. The problem with porn isn't the fucking. Not blowjobs, not carpet-munching, not hot monkey butt sex. Why do so many porn flicks refer to the women as bitches, whores, and sluts? Why is that necessary? Who are they trying to attract to their product? If the target demographic is teen boys and men who are assholes, well, I guess they think that's how to get them, I don't know. But it seems silly to me. And not just juvenile. It seems to me to be counterproductive in the long run, to call the women in porn whores and sluts. I don't give a damn about the screwing; it’s instructive, if done right. But why does the girl getting screwed have to be called a slut? Does that make it sexier for the viewer? I just don't see it."

"Why does such a large percentage of it involve so much force, so much coercion? I don't get that, either. Nowadays we know that rape isn't about sex, it's about force, about violence, about power. It's a very complicated debate, and politically loaded and charged. But there's the thing: Whatever the truth about rape in society is, if it's about power or violence, we see exactly the same thing in a fair amount of pornography. Sometimes they call it ‘non-consent’ – that's one of my all-time favorite euphemisms. 'Non-consent.' But call it whatever you want, a huge proportion of porn has nothing whatsoever to do with penises, pussies and orgasms. There's naked women tied up, bound and gagged, naked women being tortured in fake dungeons with electric prods and monstrous dildos. Gagging blowjobs. There’s porn of women crying while getting fucked. That’s just plain sadistic. Torture porn. And when the torture/sex segment is done, they have an interview with the porn actress, who's happy and smiling and talking about what part of her torture she enjoyed most, just to show the viewer that the girl is okay and it was all consensual and all in good fun. I'm okay with the consensual part -- but it's still a torture video, not a sex video, and who gets off on torture, on sadism? Somebody does. There's pissing and shitting and sex with animals. Many of the anal sex videos talk about 'destroying' a woman's asshole. That's the word they use, 'destroy.' I just don't get that, even as hyperbole, as metaphor. The girl isn't actually injured, and very often she's enjoying it, or pretending to. So why the word 'destroy'? It's just perverse. If the porn industry is a marketplace just like any other marketplace, why is such a large percentage of it so … I don't know. Twisted. Deviant. Perverted. Violent. Those are words that, as a lawyer, I find very difficult to use, or defend. For the life of me, I just cannot figure out how to write a law that says it’s perfectly okay to show people fucking just as long as he doesn’t call her a bad name, hit her, shock her with a cattle prod, hang her upside down in a dungeon or otherwise make her cry. You can fuck her butt, just don’t say you're destroying it. Light spanking is okay, whipping with a cat’o’nine-tails is not. And ball gags? Jesus Christ, what’s that about? In the 60s and 70s there was such a thing as high-class porn, artsy porn, even pretentiously artsy porn. _Playboy_ and _Penthouse_ tried to be classy and artsy, and there were a bunch of artsy Andrew Blake movies and Helmut Newton books of nudes. Then it all went into the dumper faster than a 14-year-old’s wet dream."

"I don't care at all that there's gay and lesbian porn. I don't care that there's porn with two guys blowing each other, or butt-fucking each other. I don't care that there's a ton of porn showing lesbians eating pussy and using strap-ons. And I don't care that men are said to be the largest market for lesbian porn. Go for it, game on. But I'm seriously annoyed that somewhere out there in the world, whoever makes videos of two very attractive women going down on each other finds it necessary to label them as whores. I mean, even just as a language problem it makes no sense. A whore is typically someone who sells sex for money, and usually to men. But there's nothing in those movies about money changing hands. There's nothing that suggests one of them makes her living as a prostitute. They just use the word as a derogatory, all-purpose insult, with no real meaning. There’s porn featuring first-time sluts. Now, just think about it, a first-time slut. It’s an oxymoron. It certainly isn’t meant to make them sound more attractive. It's absurd. The plotline can be a housewife MILF seducing a teenager -- male or female, straight or gay, makes no difference -- and sure enough, the women will be called whores. Cute, adorable, and allegedly innocent babysitters –according to the script, anyway -- are called sluts. Why? That's just crazy. How can you have experienced innocence? An innocent slut?"

“Is it all just niche marketing? If pornography is a marketplace, are they just reaching out to capture the elusive-but-lucrative asshole-dweeb-jacking-off-in-the-basement-of-his-parents-house demographic, the guy who’s not going to put his hand on real female flesh in a thousand years? I just don’t see it.”

"You see? It isn't the sex. It's the excess, and the attitude, the language, and by language I don’t mean the classic naughty words, fuck and ass, but the non-profane words, like 'whore' and 'destroy' and 'slut.' The actual sex is the least objectionable aspect of porn, maybe the _only_ good part. I have some really brilliant lawyers working for me, who specialize in freedom-of-speech issues, freedom-of-the-press issues, book-burning and book-banning, repealing all kinds of archaic, 19th century sex laws, and they have a really remarkable track record of success. And you know what? Not one of them has the slightest idea what to do about excess and attitude. Do you know how big a demand there is for a populist ‘Reform the Porn Industry’ movement? It’s not quite as big as the diameter of a gnat’s nipples. And since the invention of the internet, both access and excess have exploded a hundred times, a thousand times, over what it was when I was in high school. It's all unintended consequences. Moses said, 'Let my people go,' and when they finally get free in the wilderness and he’s up on the mountain getting his tablets they go crazy, worshipping golden calves and all that.”

“Let me get this straight,” she said. “You want to see a kinder, gentler, humanistic, politically correct, sensitive, New Age, warm-and-fuzzy, touchy-feely pornography of mascara-free consenting adults fucking and sucking their brains out in a respectful, consensual and polite manner.”

“That’s exactly what I want. How do you rate my chances?”

She laughed. “If it’s okay with you, I’m placing my bet on that not happening any time soon.”

“No, I don’t think so, either.”

“So what else would you like the porn industry to fix?”

“Ladies come first.”

She laughed. “From your mouth to God’s ear. What else?”

“Dial back the lipstick and mascara. Make breast implants a controlled substance and nothing bigger than a peach. A 70 percent reduction in tattoos. Better music --”

“Amen,” she said. “Amen, amen, amen.”

“— and there ought to be a rule, good-looking women can only fuck good-looking men, not some of those cretins they hire. Access to tissues and handi-wipes. Knee pads and carpeting on the floors of glory holes. Health insurance and a 401k plan.”

“Oh, my god,” she said. “I swear, someone should make you the national Czar of Pornography.”

“Thank you. It's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it.”

"Speaking of Moses, I've got more questions," she said. "How did that movie end? What happened to the Children of Israel after Moses showed them their Promised Land and led them there?"

"I wouldn't call it an unmitigated success story."

"What your generation did was take us out of the bondage of 19th century ideas and Puritanism, and for that we thank you. And your generation showed us the Promised Land of sexual freedom, that was what you said you were all fighting for, sexual freedom, and equality between men and women, and new ways of dealing with other, and not just sexually, right? And to use your own analogy, you and I are standing on Mt. Nebo and looking at the Promised Land of all that lovely, guilt-free, exciting sex, and you can't have any of it. You and your generation aren't allowed to enter that Promised Land you struggled so hard to get us to. And you don’t like a lot of it anyway, now that you’ve seen it from a distance."

"Right."

“So what did Moses see when God took him up there to the mountaintop and showed him the Promised Land? Did he see a land of milk and honey? Or was it all an illusion? A desert mirage?”

“That’s a good question,” Walter said. “As a matter of fact, all you can see from that puny hill is just a stretch of some fairly unpleasant, unpromising, scrubby desert. There’s the River Jordan, but for all the publicity it's gotten over three millennia, it's just a muddy creek. It was a pretty bleak landscape. I don’t know if it looked much different three or four thousand years ago, but I doubt it. What Moses saw in his mind’s eye we don’t know, because the bible doesn’t say. There’s no record of what he and God said to each other. Who knows, maybe Moses was pissed, and felt like he’d been cheated. His reward for a heroic life and effort and struggle that the Big Realtor in the Sky had been telling him was full of milk and honey, when all it was full of was arid hard-scrabble scrub, rocks, snakes, scorpions, killer-squatters and hype. Maybe they argued. Moses’ blood pressure skyrocketed, and he stroked out. All it says is that God showed him the Promised Land, and then Moses died, and was buried somewhere on the mountain, nobody to this day knows where.”

“I’m shaky on my biblical history. What exactly did God promise, anyway?”

“Ah, now you’re thinking like a lawyer. The bible is full of technical descriptions of where the Promised Land was located, what its borders and boundaries were, it’s practically a real estate contract. God even told the Jews there were already half a dozen other tribes living there. But what God never told Abraham, Isaac, Jacob or Moses was the character of the land itself. Never said a word about it.”

“So how did ‘the land of milk and honey’ come about?”

“When Moses was up on Mount Sinai, the Burning Bush told him about it. And all the bush said was, ‘a land flowing with milk and honey.’ That’s it. That’s the entire real estate listing Moses got from the Big Realtor in the Sky.”

“So you’re saying Moses needed a good lawyer.”

Walter laughed. “Well, he needed somebody to ask some tough questions, yes. I can understand not wanting to argue with a Burning Bush, or pressing for some details. But yes, he was promised a flawed piece of territory. How he and the Children of Israel decided to interpret ‘a land flowing with milk and honey’ is on them, not on God.”

“So God can say, ‘Hey, I never promised you a rose garden.’”

“And Moses has to respond, ‘And I was too intimidated by the pyrotechnics to read the fine print.’”

“A heck of a story and then a lame ending.”

“Tell me about it. The lawyer in me says Moses never came down from the mountain. The reason no one knows where he’s buried is they never found him and they never buried him. Maybe God buried him, but I’m pretty sure none of his kinsmen did.”

“Maybe he came back down,” she said, “but the Children of Israel had already departed. There they are, their destination in sight across the river, and Moses says, ‘Wait here, I’ll be right back.’ But he took too long, or worse, he died up there, and they beat feet--”

“Maybe they ran for the Jordan River and crossed it the moment he was out of sight, climbing up that hillside.”

“How long was he up on the mountain the first time, when he came back with the tablets?”

“On Mount Sinai? Forty days. The magic four-oh. The mountain had a cloud on top and they waited six days for it to clear. Finally on the seventh day Moses gets tired of waiting for the meteorology and he went up into the cloud for forty days and forty nights. Meanwhile the Israelites also got tired of waiting and thought something had happened to him, so they had Aaron make that famous golden calf to worship. When Moses finally came down with the tablets almost seven weeks later and saw what they were doing he got pissed and smashed the tablets. Then God gave him a mulligan, a do-over, told him to make new tablets the same as the ones he’d just smashed. Celestial court-ordered anger management class.”

“So nearly forty years later Moses again says, wait here, I’ll be right back, he goes up into another mountain, and again doesn’t come back promptly. The Jews have a track record of not waiting around patiently,” she said.

“Yes and no. Remember, this is now largely a new generation of Israelites. Most of the ones who went crazy forty years earlier are dead and gone. These are the kids and grandkids. But yes, maybe they don’t remember that time forty years ago. They wait a few days or weeks, and then figure the old guy died up there, and it’s time to move ‘em out.”

“They cross over into the Promised Land without him and live happily ever after.”

Walter laughed. “Hardly. They entered into a series of bloody wars. They fought among themselves. They themselves have their own tribes, and they lose some. They have King David and King Solomon, both brilliant leaders but very, very flawed as human beings, especially David. And then they have all the other kings, some good, some awful. They build the temple, they get conquered a couple of times, the temple is destroyed, they go back into foreign exile like in Egypt only it’s in the other direction, then, like Egypt, they come back again. They start writing stuff down, all their folk tales, they write the Old Testament, the Torah, they call it. They write down their history as best they know it, their genealogy, their laws and rules and regulations, their songs, their fables. They steal these stories like mad, from surrounding cultures, and adapt them. Sometimes all they do is change the names and not much else. They resist the Greeks but undergo a lot of assimilation. The pressure the Greeks put on their culture was almost unimaginable. They do manage to resist the Romans, but they get their ass kicked a couple times in rebellions before being dispersed in a worldwide Diaspora, a third exile. The only thing they were able to take with them were those books they wrote. The diaspora lasts until 1947. Then they have some more wars, which, so far, they have won though not without a great deal of blood, suffering and sacrifice."

"'I never promised you a rose garden.’ So what's your take-away from all this?" Their gondola had risen to the top of the circle again.

"That Moses freed them from bondage in Egypt, started them up with a set of rules and guidelines, and gave them back their original homeland, occupied by violent Bronze Age Mad Max squatters. What happened to them after they crossed the River Jordan was their own destiny, their own doing. Moses isn’t responsible for what happens after he dies."

"And he never gets his blowjob."

Walter laughed. "No, probably not."

"But do you think he was happy? He accomplished quite a lot, didn't he?"

"He did. He was a man of great faith. Of course, he had to be – he let himself be circumcised by a piece of flint in the hands of a woman with no surgical training, no anesthesia, nothing. Not even a band-aid.”

She laughed. “Gutsy,” she said. “I’d like to have heard that conversation. Moe, honey, can we lose the flap?”

“Yes. Apparently it was another one of God’s bright ideas.”

“Well, nobody asked me, but aesthetically, I think God and Mrs. Moses made the right call.”

“Maybe,” Walter said, laughing, “but there’s the down side, like there seems to be to everything. Male circumcision somehow led to female circumcision. And that is indisputably a terrible, terrible thing. A flap of loose skin is not the same thing as a clit. A world of difference.”

The ride came to its end, they left the amusement park and found a bench along the boardwalk. There was a gentle sea breeze, and they watched the twinkling lights of the rides, and the sounds of laughter.

“We’ve wandered off topic,” she said. “Tell me, what wisdom have you accumulated?”

“This is what I have discovered, over the course of the five decades, the secret to life, the secret to happiness. It isn't getting your own rocks off. For a guy, generating an orgasm is so dead simple any fool can do it in five minutes. But if you learn how to truly make love to a woman, to give her immense pleasure, to do things to her even she didn't even know she liked ... if you can do that, all the rest of it just falls into place. Making love to a woman, quite simply, is fun. A _lot_ of fun. I don't mean a guy getting _his_ rocks off. I mean a guy getting _her_ rocks off, that’s what's fun. And no, it isn’t easy, it’s a challenge and a mystery. Hell, if it was easy and any damn fool could do it, the history of the world would be vastly different. And what’s wrong with a challenge? Maybe it’s Mother Nature’s way of showing a girl how to pick the right guy. Pick the one who gets you off, not the one who rolls over and goes to sleep. Natural selection. A man’s reach should exceed his Johnson, to paraphrase Browning. Some of the challenge is intellectual and some emotional: What mood is she in, how can I make her feel even better? How can I get her to relax? How can I get her to trust me? How can I figure out what she likes and what she doesn’t? When and how do we mix it up, keep it interesting, avoid getting into a rut, the boredom.”

“But sometimes reality kicks in,” she said. “The real world. Men and women have problems. They can have different sex drives, want different things the partner can’t or won’t do. I’ve read that about ten percent of women can’t orgasm. And then there’s the 600-pound gorilla in the room, monogamy. Being faithful, the benchmark for a lot of people.”

“Right. And I don’t have any answers for that part.”

“That’s not surprising. You’re the guy who did everything by the book,” Karen said. “You’re Mr. Straight-Arrow. You didn’t fool around with your secretary, you didn’t make a pass at the babysitter, you weren’t catting around with the divorcee down the block.” She stood up from the bench and began to put on her jacket. "Come on, big spender," she said. "Get your wallet out. You're going to buy a lucky girl an ice cream cone. Two scoops."

* * *

They strolled down the boardwalk, the setting sun at their backs, eating their ice cream cones. The air was starting to cool, and Karen had put on her jacket.

“Okay, I've got a question for you,” she said.

“Shoot.”

“Why do we – men and women both, I guess – why do we assume that beautiful women and handsome men have great sex? That Beautiful People are really good at fucking? I mean, isn't there a presumption built into the idea of sex with a Playboy Bunny or a Hollywood hunk, of the handsome high school quarterback and the perky blond cheerleader, that they would all be terrific in bed? That they'd somehow know what they were doing, and they'd be really good at it, simply because they were attractive people with what we consider attractive bodies?”

“You're right. We equate physical attractiveness and desirability with skill and technique, when there really is no correlation at all. We assume good-looking people have great sex and world-class orgasms, and I suppose there's the corollary, that plain-looking people have mediocre sex, and I guess that ugly people are completely inept and incompetent at it.”

“In theory, yes. But we know those assumptions aren't remotely true. About the only thing we can say about Beautiful People fucking is they get more opportunity if they want to take it, and in theory more practice at it."

"I know, and it cuts right to heart of my complaint, that I want to know what it's like to have sex with a fantastically beautiful woman."

"Yes. But remember, you also said you wanted to know what it was like to have sex with a woman who likes to have sex. A woman who likes sex a lot isn't the same as a fantastically beautiful woman."

"That's true. But that mistaken idea, it's the core of my problem, my complaint. I could amend it slightly, and ask, what is it like to have sex with a beautiful woman who likes it and knows what she's doing,” he said. “Now I have a question."

She laughed. "You have more questions than anybody I know. Or ever met. Okay, what's your question?"

"Do I have any right to complain? Do I have any right to be envious of other people? Is it shallow and stupid and ugly and small-minded for me to complain about never having had a good blowjob? I've had a very good life. I've had a long and successful career. I had a long and generally happy if lackluster marriage, to a woman I loved and who loved me. I have children and grandchildren, everybody healthy, no major problems out of the ordinary. I have the friendship and respect of my peers. I've done good work in my life, fought the right battles, been on the right side of them, nearly always, so far as I can tell. So my sex life was bland and boring. So I never had a quality blowjob, so what? Is that petty of me? Shouldn’t I be happy and grateful for all the things I had?”

“I’m telling you right now, I’m putting the term ‘quality blowjob’ in my memoirs.”

He laughed. “I’m flattered.”

"So what else do you think about when you're having these deep thoughts?"

"I think about love, and the south of France."

"That sounds pretty romantic, but I know there's a catch. Expound, please."

"That's part of my question, is it romantic? Because I'm going back, oh, 10,000 or 20,000 years, maybe a lot more."

"Cavemen? And cave women, I suppose. What were they called, Neander-something."

"Neanderthals. But no, we're right after the Neanderthals died out, somewhere around 40,000 to 30,000 years ago. We're talking about the start of what they called early modern humans, homo sapiens, Cro-Magnon man. They have come into Europe probably from Egypt and the Middle East, and have displaced Neanderthals. There's DNA evidence that there was some intermarriage between Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals because all people today except those of African descent have a couple of percent of Neanderthal DNA. But that's still a controversial question, and I'm going to stay away from it. So here's what we know about these early moderns, the Cro-Magnon people, who lived along the Mediterranean 20,000 or 25,000 years ago. They had vocal cords and throat structure like us, so they presumably had language. They wore clothes made out of fur and animal skins, and wore jewelry. They could make fire whenever they wanted, and they cooked food. Along the coast they ate seafood, mussels and shark and tuna and whatever they could catch; we know this because they've found mussel shells and fish skeletons in their caves even several miles inland. They made tools, and were good at it. They stood and walked upright, like us, and unlike Neanderthals they had the higher foreheads we have today, their skulls looked like ours, more or less. They had black hair and we think their skin was olive-colored or maybe a little darker, and some might have had blue eyes. And here's the big thing: They had leisure time. They drew pictures on the walls of caves, they carved statues of people in stone and bone and probably in wood. They especially liked to carve figures of women, which the experts call Venus carvings, Venus figures. A lot of them show heavy-set women with huge breasts, prominent vaginas, and big bottoms. They don't think those were supposed to be anatomically correct, because they also made some carvings that were much, much closer to what modern women look like. But here's my take-away on those statues. They were keenly aware of vaginas. In some of the cruder carvings of women, they took the trouble to cut a slice into the vulva even where they had no other human detail. They carved camel toe. In my opinion they knew all about sexual reproduction and where babies come from."

"They liked pussy."

"Yes. Liked it, loved it, because they celebrated it in their carvings. A cave guy who can wile away a rainy afternoon when it's too miserable outside to hunt, or after dinner sitting around the fire, carving an attractive female doll with an anatomically correct pussy, well, we can make some assumptions about what that guy knows and what he thinks about. But that's not what interests me most."

"Of course not," she said dryly, which made him grin.

"Here's what I'd love to discover. At some point in the evolutionary chain, a young male enters puberty, the hormones kick in, and he begins to think about sex. And in his tribe or village or clan there were females, including young females roughly his own age. So what I want to know is, what did a young Cro-Magnon guy think when he looked at a young Cro-Magnon woman? At what point in human history did we start to look at each other and think, you know, I'd like to tap some of that."

She threw her head back and laughed. "Tap that?"

"I was speaking in the vernacular of you younger people. But you know what I mean. A male looks at a female and something inside his tiny brain says, hmmm, she's looking pretty good to me. When did we start to look at each other and begin to make qualitative judgments? She's cute. She's ugly. He's cute. He's ugly. He's too hairy. He looks intelligent. She’s got a nice ass. At what point did a male look at a female and get a funny feeling in his chest, and think he wanted to spend more time in her company, something different from just being horny. When, as a brand new human species, did people begin to feel affection for each other? When was ‘affection’ invented? When did love evolve? When did a young woman cave chick look at a young guy in the next cave, and hope maybe he'd look her way?"

"When was puppy love invented? Wow," she said.

"Right," he said. "Today we talk about how love and sex get intertwined, two different things that can get confused with each other. Do I love her, or is it just lust? People have sex without loving each other."

"Happens all the time. Grudge fucks. Revenge fucks. Power fucks. Celebrity fucks. Ego fucks. Sex for money. Sex just because you’re horny, fuckbuddy sex. One can even make a comfortable living from it."

"I've heard that rumor, too," Walter said. "And here's the thing. The urge to have sex has always existed, it's built into reproduction itself. Birds do it, bees do it, all that. But somewhere along the line emotions began to evolve, and sex started becoming attached to love instead of brute reproduction. So about when did that happen? I read someplace that there's a theory that the earliest modern humans didn't have separation of gender roles. Males and females did the same things, they both hunted, both fished, both made tools, whatever. And then it was only later on that gender roles began to split, that males became the hunters and women became the home-builders and gatherers. I find it an interesting idea, but I don't know what to make of it, and there's part of it that bothers me."

"What's that?"

"I can comprehend that males and females did all sorts of things interchangeably, hunted, tanned hides, whatever. But from the very git-go, only one gender made and carried babies, and one gender didn't. We find gender roles, especially regarding mating and raising offspring, all over the Animal Kingdom, even down into very simple animals. So from the very git-go there had to be some sort of differentiated gender roles that had nothing to do with societal roles. It had to be Me Tarzan, You Jane, from Day One."

"Can I interject some questions?"

"Sure, go for it."

"At what point did one cave woman look at another cave woman and think, hmmm, that chick turns me on more than those guy cavemen do. And then the same thing for men."

"Absolutely, great question. Homosexuality exists in other parts of the Animal Kingdom, it isn’t just a human activity. Nowadays we are beginning to think that sexuality and orientation are fluid. Or at least, people say it's much more fluid for women than it is for men. So let us ask, was it always that way, throughout human history? And was it relatively static, more or less in roughly the same proportions as now, or did it ebb and flow, for one or both genders? Were there gay caveguys? Lesbian cavewomen? Trans-gender Neanderthals? Bi-hunter-gatherers?"

"Butch cave dykes?" Karen asked. "Effeminate cave boy hairdressers? Were there pillow queens before there were pillows? Leather boys before there was leather? Were there cave lesbians who had gay caveguy besty friends?"

"Caveguy interior decorators? Cro-Magnons with benefits?"

"Wouldn't it be so cool if the person -- let's assume it was a guy -- who drew all those paintings on the walls of those caves was gay. Da Vinci and Michelangelo were gay, right? So maybe the guy who did those cave paintings was, too. And while we're at it, did the original Sappho wear a butch lumberjack flannel toga? If you take away our horrible joke stereotyping, there are good questions underneath."

"At what point did sexual orientation start to become problematic, either for the individual person, or for the local society around him or her? When were social norms invented, and why, and how? If there were gay and lesbian Cro-Magnons, when and why did homosexuality begin to become stigmatized?"

"When did Cave Jane start to realize there was something a little bit different about herself, that she was a little different from all the other cave girls," she asked.

"The Love That Dare Not Grunt Its Name. When did we start to care where a male put his dick? When did we decide only one gender was allowed to eat pussy, and one gender wasn’t?"

“Or neither gender was allowed to, which was even worse,” she said. “When did we start to differentiate between which holes were used for which purposes? I assume anal sex goes way, way back, too. So when did humankind decide a male could fuck a female in the butt, but not another male? And here's another stumper. Back then, did you cave guys like to watch a pair of lesbian cave girls go down on each other? You modern straight guys eat it up with a spoon."

"I know. And here's something I find odd. When you read about the ancient Greeks, homosexuality seems to be rampant everywhere, and it was accepted. The sad thing is, we seem to have gone through an excessive and unnecessary period of some millennia when we tried to stamp it out. I don't know what we could have been thinking."

“But they weren't trying to stamp out lesbianism. They were focused on gay men. We women and our fluid desires weren’t worth bothering with.”

“That's true. All that business about Onan and men spending our seed on the ground. Nothing about lady eggs being squandered during lady masturbation. Although I'm guessing they had no idea about lady eggs, although they recognized semen as seed. But it's apparent that homosexuality had begun to become stigmatized somewhere along the line for it to start popping up in biblical writings, although only about men.”

She laughed. "You guys. Have you always had your hypocritical heads up your asses, or was that something you learned only after you wandered up out of Olduvai Gorge?"

"Sometimes I think it must be something we had to learn relatively recently in our evolution. I don't see how our species could be four million years old if we were always this ignorant."

She laughed. They had been walking down the boardwalk for some time.

“Want to turn around and start back?” he asked.

“Sure,” she said. “If we don’t I think we’ll be in Connecticut soon. So, where are we in our discussion?”

"I keep coming back to this question I have, this thing I want to know about that couple, that Cro-Magnon man and woman living in that cave on the shores of the Mediterranean in France or Spain 15,000 or 20,000 years ago. I want to know what their relationship was like, how they interacted with each other. I have this image in my head, this man and woman. There's a fire to keep warm, there's food, they are alone, they are comfortable. Do they like each other? Do they love each other, love like we think of it now? Is she attracted to him? When he's out hunting, does she miss him? Does she keep watch, waiting for him to come back with his friends and fellow hunters? Does she get horny, and does she think about him, about making love when he comes home? Was sex something she liked? When he's out with his friends, do they talk about their women? Are they monogamous, or polyamorous, how does that work? Are they possessive? When did the guy start thinking, ‘She’s mine’? When did the woman think, ‘He’s mine’? When did monogamy displace multiple partners? Does he think she's pretty? Or sexy? Does the sight of her turn him on? Do they have pet names for each other, terms of endearment?”

"Is there foreplay? Do they like this position or that? Does she make noise when she comes," Karen asked. "Does he make a lot of noise? And I'm not making a joke of this, but afterward ... does he roll over and go to sleep? Does she?”

“Oh, my God, you’re asking if they snuggle afterward,” he said. “When did cuddling evolve. Do they do repeats? Does she have multiple orgasms? Does she even have orgasms at all, or does he just fuck away until he gets off, and then it's game over. Do they talk quietly? Do they tease, does he make her laugh? Do they spoon? Does he brush her hair back? Do they kiss, tenderly? Is he gentle with her? Does he know the secret places she likes to be touched, that furry spot on her forearm, the back of her neck, behind her knees, that smooth, silky patch on her upper thighs. Does she like his grin, and the way he looks at her?"

“When was modesty invented?” she asked. “Was she shy? When did he start asking her to take off her leopardskin more slowly? Did she ever ask him, ‘Does this bearskin make me look fat?’”

He laughed. “Well, we know something about modesty, because we have the story of Adam and Eve and the apple and the fig leaves. What it tells us is that three or four thousand years ago nakedness was a big deal, it's imbedded at the heart of one of Western Civilization’s oldest creation stories. It tells us that thousands of years ago humans were indifferent to nudity, and then somehow it became a major thing, nakedness and shame and hiding our private parts and all of it being stigmatized. So how did all that evolve? When our Cro-Magnon couple were horny in that cave 20,000 years ago, did she make him put the fire out first so they could make love in the dark? Did he plead with her, ‘Dear, tonight could we do it with the bonfire on? Just this once?’ What positions did they use? Reverse Cro-girl?”

He looked at her and saw that she was grinning, staring out over the ocean. "What?"

She turned and smiled at him. "You," she said. "You're such a romantic. You must be a charter member of the Illinois chapter of the Hopeless Romantic Society. We're talking about cavemen and cave women, and you want to know if he nuzzled her earlobes twenty thousand years ago and made sure she climaxed first before he did, and whether she liked it on top, and whether he whispered 'I love you, Wilma Flintstone.'"

Walter felt himself blushing, and in one of the few times in his life was utterly speechless.

“And the other thing I want to know is,” she said, “did he give her what you’d probably call a ‘quality carpet-munching?’”

He laughed. “I’m pretty sure he did, I’m willing to bet he rang her chimes.”

They walked quietly for a minute, enjoying the evening. Up ahead, they could see the lights of the amusement park and see the Ferris wheel.

“There’s something I’ve been debating with myself, whether I wanted to talk about it,” he said.

She thought about saying something smart-ass, but his tone warned her off.

“Okay,” she said.

“I’ve never told this to anyone, ever. Part of it is I don’t know who I’d tell. A shrink or a priest, maybe, but I don’t have either one.”

“So I’m it.”

“Guess so. Here it is. One day about three or four years before Ellie died this sudden realization just popped into my head. Nothing I'm aware of prompted it or triggered it. One moment it wasn’t there, and the next moment it was, full blown. It was this: I realized that I would never be in love, ever again. I mean passionately, romantically in love, the kind of love that makes your heart beat fast, makes your chest hurt. When you think about the other person day and night, when you can’t wait to talk to them again, tell them about your day or something that happened. Every time the phone rings you hope it’s her. When that person is the center of your life.

“I had been in love with somebody, every single day of my life, ever since I was 12 years old when I got my first crush on Patty Thompson in seventh grade. Before Ellie I had been in love with three other women, two unrequited and nothing ever happened, they never knew I was in love with them. Patty was the first, and then a different girl from my high school I yearned for during most of college, and then the third woman my senior year of college and a few years after, during law school. And I had crushes pretty regularly, but nothing serious. But those three, and Ellie, were serious, and the thing is, I never fell out of love with any of them. Even Patty from seventh grade. Because I had no reason to fall out of love. The new one took the place of the previous one kind of seamlessly, without … I don’t know. Without displacing the previous one, but adding the new one to the list. I loved all four of them every day of my life ever since, but of course it cools off, fades away. And that’s what I realized: That there would never be another one. Never a woman who made my heart pound, who made my chest hurt. That I would never pine over, moon over, never listen to love songs and dream about her. Never obsess over, maybe. Never think about kissing her, holding her. Never create fantasies about the two of us. Never get that pain under my ribs, that longing. It was like my pilot light went out. I guess that sounds stupid, but that’s what I thought the minute it happened. My candle, my fire, went out, and I would never re-light it. For the first time in half a century, I wasn’t in love with anyone, and I never would be again.”

They walked in silence.

“You liked being in love,” she said. “A love addict. Addicted to love. Cue Robert Palmer.”

“I was. I did. I do. And I still loved my wife, and of course my kids and grandkids, and my parents, even though they’d passed, and I have a sister and a brother-in-law, and their kids, and some friends. I still loved them all, but of course that’s a different kind of love, even with my wife after thirty-something years, married love changes, too. But I would never again have that special feeling. I would never again yearn for someone.”

“So, without sounding like a shrink, I have to ask, how did that make you feel?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been processing it ever since. A little sad. A little sorry for myself. I knew I’d miss it, no question. I felt like I had learned so much about how to love a woman – and I’d never get to use that skill, that knowledge. Like Michelangelo with no paint and no brush. Beethoven with no piano.

“I realized that all those nights when I was a teenager listening to the radio and pining for Patty Thompson that I loved that pain, that longing, and I missed it. And I will never feel that way again. This may sound weird – but I was good at it, good at being lovesick. There would be no more Patty Thompsons, no young Ellie typing my writs and pleadings in short-shorts and my old college sweatshirt, bent over and fixing typos with correction fluid, her hair up in a bun, and her neck driving me crazy with wanting to kiss it, that little thin line of hair that went down her neck a little, that I loved to play with.”

“Oh, God,” she said. “You’re a back-of-the-neck guy.”

“I used to sit in ninth grade English and stare at the back of Patty’s neck. Ay yi yi. And horny like a rhinoceros. In tenth grade I wanted to eat her earlobes. In eleventh she sat beside me, and I was against the wall so I could turn sideways and look at her legs. She had this birthmark, not very big, maybe the size of a dime, on her calf muscle. I wanted to kiss it and make it better. I wanted to touch it and make it go away so when it did then she’d be perfect, except for this slight imperfect bump on her nose that I loved above all the things that were perfect. That one flaw that makes the masterpiece a work of art, you know? That bump on her nose. She was going with Jack Krause, who I thought was an asshole. I sat behind them on the booster bus going to the football game at Phillipsville High, it was a Friday night in late October and it was dark at 6:30. I watched as Jack and Patty turned to each other and kissed. And I wanted it to be me she was kissing, but it never was, it was never going to be me and I knew that, and I had a pain all across my chest that I think to this day must be what a real heart attack must feel like, wham, all four ventricles seizing up simultaneously. My chest literally hurt, it’s not a figure of speech. And it’s now forty-nine years later minus a couple weeks, but I remember that kiss like it was twenty minutes ago. It wasn’t a long kiss, no tongue, nothing like that. It was almost, well, chaste, in a kind of way. And I knew even then that if she’d ever kissed me like that, I’d have been a dead man. I’d of happily died right then and there. It was like the kiss of an angel, and she gave it to a jerk-off like Jack Krause instead of me. That fucking kiss haunted me all through eleventh grade, twelfth grade and freshman year of college. I mean, it was like this tiny little nuclear reactor inside my rib cage, quietly humming away and putting out a steady, even heat and a couple hundred watts of the most incredible, intense heartburn. And at night in my room, doing my Algebra II homework, I’d play my 45s, all those love songs everyone listened to.”

They walked silently for a while. “I bet I’ve seen ten thousand kisses on TV and in movies. And I’ve done some of it myself. But there will only ever be one kiss, Patty Thompson gently kissing Jack Krause on the booster bus to an away game at Phillipsville, fourth seat from the back, left side of the aisle, about 6:40 p.m., outside air temperature a crisp 55 degrees, Mr. Prescott driving the bus, Mr. Gowdy and Mrs. Harkins the chaperones up front. For the life of me I couldn’t tell you who was sitting beside me, it could have been Godzilla, but I remember Patty was wearing this campus jacket she had, the kind with leather sleeves, and her hair was in a ponytail and I could see her neck and her ears and how they talked quietly to each other.”

“You must have hated him.”

“Funny thing, no, I didn’t, even though I thought he was a jerk. What I thought was, Krause, if you mess this up, you dickhead, you’re the dumbest fool in all of creation. And if you ever hurt her, I’ll fucking kill you. And he did, somehow, fuck it up, I don’t know how or why, but they broke up after Thanksgiving and by New Year’s she was going out with one of the football players, our best tight end, who later became a lawyer like me and who Patty actually married after they graduated from college.”

“How does her story end?”

“Three marriages, two divorces, a couple kids, a couple grandkids. The middle marriage was pretty long, more than twenty-some years, so I guess that one took. I don’t know what happened, I lost touch. But a few years ago she married another guy from our class and last I knew they were happy. And guess where they live?”

“Worst Jeopardy question ever. What is Phillipsville, Alex?”

He laughed and didn’t have to answer.

“And you think, what if she had married you?”

“We’d be a few years away from celebrating our fiftieth wedding anniversary. Is it too egotistical to think that I’d have made her happy? That I’d have been a great husband, a world-class husband?”

“You were,” Karen said. “Just with somebody else. Patty’s loss, Ellie’s gain. And anyway, you’re only half of that mythical marriage, and she’s the other half. Maybe she’d have cheated on you. Or turned into a bitch of one kind or another. A nag. Frigid. Indifferent. OCD. A princess. Spend all your money. Turn to drugs. Become a gambler. Some other variety of crazy. You don’t seem to know why her first two marriages broke up. Maybe it was her, maybe him, maybe both, maybe no fault.”

“Well, thanks for the major buzz kill,” he said, making her laugh. “Now I feel so much better I didn’t marry her.”

"No," she said. "You'd have married her no matter what. Even if you'd known it would turn bad. You’d have thought you could fix it."

"Yes," he agreed.

They came to the amusement park and turned up Stillwell Avenue. There were still lots of people at the amusement park, people were squealing from the Ferris wheel and the bumper cars, and Nathan’s was packed, even at that hour.

“Let’s take a cab,” he said, “and I’ll tell you a little bit about tomorrow. Same time, same drill, wear comfy, casual clothes and bring a bag to change into something knockout for dinner and the theater. That’s all I’m going to say about that, the details will be a surprise. You know what tomorrow is?”

“Sunday.”

“Right. But not just any Sunday. Tomorrow is Sunday in New York. The pinnacle of my bucket list. Sunday in New York, in autumn. It was a movie, and there’s a song about it. Broadway. Bistros. Times Square, Fifth Avenue. The way the light hits the leaves turning color in Central Park … .”

**Sunday in New York**

When she got to his hotel on Sunday morning she was surprised to see a city EMT ambulance truck out front with its lights flashing, and several police cars. There was only one cop standing near them, apparently waiting for something and looking bored. And in the space of only a fraction of a second, she knew. It was for him. She told herself that you see ambulances and fire trucks and police cruisers all over the city night and day, and it didn't mean anything. She didn't believe it this time.

She went through the revolving door into the hotel lobby with a sense of dread. No, she thought, no. Please don’t let it be him, please God, no.

The lobby appeared normal, though, and no one looked at her or gave her a moment’s thought; she carried her small overnight bag again, and her hanging garment bag. Like the day before, she was wearing her cross-trainers, slacks, a button-down shirt and a windbreaker: nobody’s hooker. There were no EMTs or police in the lobby. She took an elevator to the fifth floor. When she stepped into the foyer fear gripped her heart again. Down at the end of the corridor where Walter’s room was, there were two cops in the hallway, standing casually and looking into Walter’s hotel room. There was no air of urgency, no panic. No visible sign of anything wrong, beyond their mere presence.

She forced herself to make her face an impassive mask, and tried as calmly as she could to walk down the hall. As she approached, the cops turned to watch her coming, and they backed against the wall to give her room to pass.

When she got to the first cop, she said. “Hi. What’s wrong?”

The cop regarded her calmly. “Looks like a heart attack. An older guy. It happens,” he said. “You aren’t related to him, or anything, are you?”

“Uh, no,” she said. “I’m down the hall, around the corner. I was just curious.”

“Well, you have a good day, miss,” the cop said.

“You, too,” she said, and continued down the hall, and took the turn to the right, and kept walking until she found the emergency stairwell. She went into it as quietly as she could, and started walking quickly down the steps to the lobby and out the front door. The doorman was just then putting someone into a cab out in the street on the far side of the EMT truck, and when he turned he saw her coming through the revolving door with tears streaming down her cheeks.

“Is everything all right, miss?” he asked, concerned.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” she said. “Thank you.”

“Can I get you a taxi?”

“Uh, no,” she said. “I’ll walk. Thank you.” She started down the block, her overnight bag in one hand and the garment bag over her shoulder. He watched her walk away.

When she got to the corner the light was red, so she sat her overnight suitcase down and draped the garment bag over it, and got a tissue from her purse. She blew her nose softly and mopped away the tears on her face, but more were coming, so she stopped trying. She turned and looked up the block. A cluster of EMTs and police were coming out of the hotel with a body on a gurney. The body was fully covered, in a black bag, no one could see who it was. She couldn’t see them load the body into the EMT truck, but she could see there was no hurry about it. When they were done the cops got into their cars and the EMTs got into their emergency truck, and they all drove away. They obeyed the speed limit, as much as people in their professions ever do, and she watched them all go past her in the light Sunday morning traffic. There were no lights flashing, and no sirens.

**Two Weeks Later, And After**

Two weeks later she got a call from Caroline. “Hey, babe, how’s it going?”

“Hi, Caroline. I’m fine. Whatcha got for me?”

“It’s not an outcall. I got a phone call from some lawyer out in Illinois somewhere. He wanted to talk to you.”

“Did he say what about?”

“No. He said it was a confidential legal matter, only that you weren’t in trouble. He said you might possibly know what it was about, but he could only discuss it with you.”

“Did he mention me by name? My full name?” The web site only gave her first name as Karen. Caroline would have given clients her last name, Preston, only when the deal was booked.

“Yes, baby, he knew who you were. I assume it has to do with your customer from last month or whoever that was. Walter Tapley. That was one of the names of the law firm he said. Tapley, Whosits, Whosits and Whatsit. I told him I couldn’t give out your phone number, but that I’d contact you and ask you to call him. He said that was acceptable, but could I make sure I told you as soon as possible. Apparently there’s some kind of deadline thing. I have his name and phone number.”

“Okay, give it to me.” Karen wrote it down on a scratch pad. “Okay, thanks, Caroline. I’ll give them a call.”

She sat at her kitchen table in her bathrobe for a few minutes, staring out the window out over Central Park West. Her roommate, Bobbi, came into the kitchen dressed in her leotards and exercise outfit. “Hey, love, come on, get dressed. We have Pilates in half an hour.” She got a bottle of water out of the refrigerator and then saw the look on Karen’s face. “Something wrong?”

“No. At least, I don’t think so. I have to call this lawyer out somewhere near Chicago.”

“Are you in trouble? This about that guy?”

“I think so.”

“Want me to call him and tell him you’ve moved to Switzerland?”

Karen smiled. “No. But thanks. If I ever have to dodge extradition, you’re the first person I’m going to call.”

“No problem. Let me know when you’re ready.”

“’Kay.” She sat another moment, took a big breath, and dialed the number on her cell phone.

“Tapley, Kennicott, Sanderson and Parks,” the receptionist who took the call answered. “How may I direct your call?”

“Aaron Kennicott, please. This is Karen Preston, returning his call.”

“One moment, please.”

“Miss Preston? This is Aaron Kennicott. Thanks for returning my call.”

“No problem. What can I do for you, Mr. Kennicott?”

“Call me Aaron. It’s more like what I can do for you. I’m the executor of Walter Tapley’s estate, and there’s some things about that I wanted to discuss with you.”

“Okay.”

“I also wanted to tell you I was Walter’s best friend, ever since I don’t know when, as well as a partner in this firm--”

“I heard the story,” Karen said. “You and Walter and a couple of other young bucks quit your jobs and went out and started your own little kick-ass boutique law firm.”

She heard Kennicott laugh. “He told you that story, did he? I’m not surprised. Yes, there was Walter and me, and Bennie Sanderson and Jack Parks. We all sat around Walter's kitchen table plotting mutiny and rebellion while Ellie cooked and typed up briefs and kept us fed in meatloaf and Michelob until we were successful enough to afford to go out for dinner. But I digress. What I am required to tell you is that Walter left you something in his will, and as executor of that will, I am charged with distributing his gifts and bequests.”

There was a long silence on the line.

“Miss Preston?”

“I’m here. I’m … he left me something? I don’t know what to say.”

“Walter was a generous guy, and I guess the best way to say this is, he had a lot of fun with his last will and testament. He’s one of the few people I ever met who thought making out a will was grand entertainment. Most of his estate went to his family, as you might expect, and there was a whole ton of legal mumbo-jumbo having to do with his partnership in the law firm. And of course it all had to go into probate in accordance with Illinois law, which is basically 755 ILCS 5, the Probate Act of 1975—“

“Sure,” she said. “Good old 755 ILCS 5.”

Kennicott laughed. “Okay, I guess I wandered off into attorney land. Occupational hazard.”

“There’s no need to apologize, Mr. Kennicott. Do I have to come out there for a reading of the will or something? I don’t know anything about this kind of thing.”

“No, there won’t be any reading of the will. That’s mainly a Hollywood myth. Contrary to popular belief, it’s pretty rare that the family all gathers in the attorney’s office and the will is actually read out loud, and the relatives get to bitch at each other and make a scene. So, no, you won’t have to come out and sit through all the drama. There’s actually quite a lot of work that needs to be done, but it’s all behind-the-scenes stuff, filing papers with the probate judge in Circuit Court, and so on. The part that concerns you is that I’m coming to our New York office next week and I wanted to see if I could meet with you to give you your inheritance gift and discuss a few details. We could do it all by mail, but I thought face-to-face might be better, especially if you had questions. It’s all pretty informal, though. Basically I hand you an envelope, and you sign a piece of paper saying you received it.”

“That’s all there is to it?”

“That’s it. You’ll probably have some questions, and I’ll be happy to explain anything you need to know.”

“Do you want me to come to your office?”

“That would be fine, or if you prefer, we can just meet somewhere else. I’m staying at the Waldorf-Astoria; would you like to meet there and have a drink at the bar?”

“Sure, that would be fine.”

“Great. Next Thursday, the 19th, say at 5 o’clock?”

* * *

The bar was off the Waldorf’s majestic lobby, up a half flight of stairs and to the right. It was dark and luxurious and paneled in rich woods. There were a dozen men and women along the bar, and sitting at small tables nearby. Toward the back there were more tiny tables with large leather-bound chairs. When she came in and looked around a tall, an older man stood up at one and signaled her.

“Mr. Kennicott?”

“That I am,” he said. “Miss Preston?”

“That's me,” she said, shaking his hand. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“Please, be seated,” he said. He waved toward the bar and a waiter appeared, faster than Superman and the speeding bullet. “What would you like?” he asked her.

She saw he already had a martini in front of him. “Drambuie, straight up,” she said to the waiter. She saw Kennicott smile. He was a large man with florid coloring and a shock of white hair. He was dressed as conservatively as she, he in dark Brooks Brothers and she in DKNY, from the Power Lunch series.

“I wish we were meeting under better circumstances,” he said.

“Me, too,” she said. “I imagine you’ve had a tough day. A tough week or two, maybe.”

He smiled wanly. “The last few weeks haven’t been fun, I admit. Although I knew they were coming. You see, like Walter, I was mostly retired, just puttering around with the firm whenever I felt like it, and being retired when I wanted to. But since I’m the executor of Walter’s estate, I went back to full-time work for a week or two, doing my duty.”

“What did you mean, you knew this was coming?”

“Yes. I said that, didn’t I? Well, I did know it was coming. I knew Walter was probably going to die soon, and he knew it, too. We were both kind of just waiting for it to happen.”

“I … don’t understand. Someone … I heard it was a heart attack.”

“Not exactly, no. About two years ago, a doctor discovered Walter had what is called an aortic aneurysm. Basically, it’s kind of a bubble that forms somewhere along the aorta, that’s the main artery coming out of the heart. Biggest artery in your body, thicker than your thumb. These aneurysms start to become a problem when the wall gets weak and the aorta develops a bubble, almost like a hernia, in a way. When they get to be about two inches wide, that’s serious, and there’s been cases where they go up to five or six inches across. Usually they have no symptoms at all, or the symptoms can be weird and seem unrelated. Back pain, for instance. In Walter’s case, his voice got hoarse, and he didn’t know why, so he went to the doctor. Doctor does some tests, says you’re hoarse because the whoosy-whatsis nerve to your vocal cards is wrapped around this bulge in your aorta right where it comes out of the top of the heart and then does a one-eighty, like a sink trap, going down into the body. Sometimes these things can be repaired by surgery, they go in and shore up the weak spot. The problem is, these aneurysms are at very high risk of rupturing because the wall is so thin, like a bubble, and when they do rupture they usually kill you in a matter of two or three minutes, tops. Basically, you hemorrhage massively inside yourself, you bleed out into your own chest cavity. It’s fatal about eighty, ninety percent of the time, and even if it happens while you’re in the hospital, while you’re in the middle of the repair surgery, say, if that thing pops, it’ll kill you right there on the table about fifty, sixty percent of the time. Half the people who get a ruptured aortic aneurysm die before they get to the hospital. They’re pretty bad. Einstein died from one, five years after they thought they had repaired his. Do you remember ‘I Love Lucy’? Lucille Ball died from one. And Conway Twitty died from one, while he was on tour, I think it was. You know who Conway Twitty was?”

“Yes. He was like Elvis, sort of. He was the guy they modeled the musical _Bye, Bye, Birdie_ from.”

“That’s right. When Walter was told he had this aneurysm they did all the tests and scans and MRIs and whatnot, and they saw that his was an especially high-risk surgery. It wasn’t inoperable, per se, but they told him he’d probably die on the table if they got in there and started messing with it. So they left the call up to him, either get the surgery with pretty high risk of dying then and there, or just leaving it alone and everyone crossing their fingers. If he went that route, the best they could do was control his blood pressure, keep it low, check his cholesterol, that sort of thing, and minimize stress. No major physical activity, nothing that would disturb his heart and get too much blood pumping too fast. You follow?”

“Yes, I see,” she said. Now she knew why Walter wouldn’t go to bed with her. When he'd told her all that sex would kill him she thought he was kidding, just exaggerating, but he wasn’t. Sex probably would have quite literally killed him. Not only that, but the better the sex was, the riskier it would have been. A lot of men might have chosen to die in the saddle, but not Walter. It might not be a bad way to go, but he wouldn't do it to her, traumatize her, make her be an unwitting partner to it, and stick her with the mess and trauma of dealing with it. That simply wasn't Walter's way. He might have wanted to die in her arms – what man wouldn't? – but it would be a rotten thing to do to her.

He didn’t die of a broken heart, she thought, just a broken aorta. It was a good line. No, a great line, but she had no one to tell it to. Certainly not Kennicott, who she hardly knew. And there’d be too much backstory, all of it also very private.

“He never mentioned it to me,” she said.

“No, I don’t think he would have,” Kennicott said. “I was the only one he told. He didn’t even tell his children. He said everyone would start treating him with kid gloves, like some fragile invalid, and he couldn’t stand that idea. He gave up driving, of course. He told everyone it was an eyesight problem, a little retinitis pigmentosa, but the real reason was he didn’t want to have the thing pop and he’d ram a school bus or something awful. He didn’t want to risk anybody else dying just because he was going to. At the time, he was halfway retired anyhow, so he stopped doing any serious work that would stress him very much, and he just puttered around the office. You know he was a widower, right?”

“Yes, I knew. He told me.”

“Right. Well, he knew he was probably going to die from this thing, and he didn’t know how long he had, days, months, a year, ten years, twenty years, there was no way to tell. And living in that house without Ellie, well, I’m sure he was lonely. So he started this kind of variation on a bucket list thing. He seemed to be on some sort of quest, but he wouldn’t talk about it or tell me what it was. He would go away on trips for a few days, and I had only a vague idea where he was or what he was doing. I know he went to Vancouver and visited with his son for a while, he went to San Francisco, he was in the Florida Keys, he took a cruise along the Alaskan coast, you know, looking at glaciers and grizzly bears. His family and his associates here at the firm, they all just assumed he was this lonely widower making an effort to enjoy his retirement and seeing the world. A couple people even started to try to find him a suitable lady friend to spend his golden years with, but he told them thanks but no thanks. There was a joke in the office that he was going to live forever, prowling the halls in his cardigan sweater until he was a hundred years old. I was the only one in the world who knew otherwise. And then one day he was looking for something, a certain woman he could talk to about something important. He was auditioning them, that’s what he called it. Auditioning. I’m guessing you were the one who got the job, whatever it was.”

“Can I ask a question? There’s something I don’t understand.”

“Sure, go ahead.”

“How did I get into his will? How did he do that? I only met him for the first time on the Friday evening before he died. I only knew him for a day and a half, at most. I don’t understand how he put me in his will. When did he do that?”

“He did it late that Saturday night,” Kennicott said. “In an e-mail. It was time-stamped about twelve-thirty Saturday night. Well, early Sunday morning. He had his laptop with him, of course, he took it with him everywhere, like we all do nowadays. It was a fairly long message, telling me to put you into the will in what’s called a codicil, with all the terms and conditions and so forth—“

“He loved his terms and conditions, didn’t he?”

Kennicott laughed. “Yes, he surely did. He was a lawyer right to the bitter end, I suppose. Maybe it wasn’t bitter, though. That I can’t say.”

“Bittersweet,” she said. “It was bittersweet.”

“Okay. I’ll take your word for it. I like to think he died happy.”

“I think he did,” she said.

“Did he find what he was looking for? His quest?”

“Yes, I think so. Most of it, anyway.”

“Well that’s good. I don’t suppose you can tell me what it was?”

“No. I'm sorry. Attorney-client privilege.”

Kennicott laughed. “Okay, right, right.”

Karen thought Kennicott seemed like a nice man, and if he said he was Walter's best friend for decades, she had no reason to doubt it. But she would sooner lie to him – or to a grand jury, for that matter – than betray the secret Walter had told her, a secret a hundred time more intimate than any sex act: That Walter had been in love for half a century, but never would be again. And he missed it.

“It was … something between us, that’s all. Just … things he wanted to know, things he wanted to talk about. So, you’re telling me that after he went back to his hotel, he sat up half the night writing me into his will?”

“More or less, yes. I don’t know what time he got back to the hotel, but I estimate he spent maybe an hour writing up his instructions, and then he e-mailed them to me. I got the call late Sunday that Walter had died, so I was pretty busy for quite a while after that, making phone calls, and I didn’t look at my e-mail until Monday afternoon, so I didn’t know about the new codicil right away. Because of his medical condition, I had his power-of-attorney, because we didn’t know what would happen to him or how fast, and there were do-not-resuscitate orders and so forth to execute, so someone needed to be the instant decision-maker for him in case anything happened. So, long story short, he e-mailed me the change to the will, and he had a copy of it printed out there in the hotel. He found the night clerk, and had him witness his signature, and then he faxed me the signed copy to make sure it was all legal, and then he put the signed hard copy in the snail mail, and I got it a few days later.

“But here’s the part I wanted you to be aware of. When somebody dies like that, in a hotel, in some city far from home, the police and the medical examiner do an autopsy, and they often treat the scene like a potential crime scene, at least until they can rule out foul play. And they interview witnesses. So you need to know what the police discovered. They know he went out to dinner with a woman Friday night, but they also determined that Walter slept alone that night. They know he was out all day and evening, and came back to the hotel alone Saturday night. There was no indication of any second person in his bed, nobody else’s DNA. He was up late doing the codicil and talking to the front desk people, getting it witnessed and faxed. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“I … yes, I guess.”

“Police and medical examiners know that when an older guy dies of a heart attack in a hotel room, pretty often there was someone else there, and they were--”

“Having sex,” she finished for him.

“Yes. Either having sex or if the guy was alone he was watching porn, and they know Walter wasn't watching porn; the charges would have been on his hotel bill, and anyway it was 7:30 in the morning. And they learned from the front desk he’d been working on his will and faxing things and had someone witness his signature. What I’m telling you is, they know sex wasn’t a factor with Walter. They know he was alone. They know only one person slept in his bed, and there was no DNA on the sheets, no stray hairs, no nothing that wasn't his. What I’m telling you is, the police and the medical examiner are not interested in you. I wanted you to rest easy about that.”

“I see. Thank you.”

“They hardly even know you exist. They know Walter went out to dinner with somebody, but they don’t know who it was, and they also don’t care, because they know now it’s not relevant. They talked to me and I told them about the aneurysm and the autopsy confirmed it, so they know it was natural causes. And since I didn’t even know you existed until after I got Walter’s paperwork, I never told them anything about you, and I think even if I did know, I probably wouldn’t have said anything. So nobody knows about you, Miss Preston, not even his family.”

“Nobody but you.”

“Yes, there’s just me. But I know you didn’t sleep with him that night. I know you had nothing to do with his death.”

“Thank you.”

“No problem.” There was a long silence.

“Can I ask another question?” she finally asked.

“Sure.”

“How … did it happen?”

“It was that morning. He’d gotten up, taken a shower, and was almost finished getting dressed. He had no warning. That thing, the aneurysm, the goddam aneurysm--” there was a pause while Kennicott collected himself – “it just burst. He knew it, and he got as far as the phone. He collapsed, and dragged the phone down onto the floor with him. He was able to call the front desk, he said the word ‘Help,’ and by the time they got somebody to his room he was already gone. They did CPR until the EMTs arrived, of course. They even had one of those defibrillators, you know, to shock him, but of course they only work with heart attacks. Nobody working on him knew about the aneurysm, of course, so they shocked him half a dozen times, but he was already gone. There was nothing anyone could have done. Walter had known that all along.”

Kennicott gave her a minute to dab her eyes with a tissue.

“I guess I was in the taxi then,” she finally said. “We were going to go get lox and bagels. When I got to the hotel the EMTs and the police were there. I knew, even in the lobby, that it was him. Don’t ask me how I knew, I just did. But of course I want up to his floor. I saw … I saw it was his room, I knew then I was right, it was him. So I just kept going. I walked right past the door of his room and left the hotel and went home. I should have … I should have--”

“No, you did the right thing,” Kennicott said. “Believe me. If you’d have stopped, they’d have asked you who you were, and your relationship would have come out, and they’d all have known about it, and they’d have taken you in for questioning, and it would have been a mess for you. And maybe for his family, too.”

“But he and I, we didn’t--”

“I know you didn’t. But it wouldn’t have mattered. The only story anyone would have thought about was that Walter was in New York with a high-priced call girl, and that’s what made his aneurysm explode, that fucking the hooker is what killed him. That’s what people would think, and that’s the language they’d have used, even if it wasn’t true.”

He let her have a minute.

“Okay, thanks for telling me,” she finally said.

“No problem,” he said. “Would you like another drink? Because I’m damn sure going to have one, and Walter’s estate is paying for it.” She nodded, and he signaled the waiter for two more. Then he reached into his jacket pocket and brought out a business envelope. “This is what he left you in his will.”

“What is it?” she asked, out of reflex, and he said nothing, just let her open it and read it. There was a cover letter, a page and a half on the letterhead of the law firm, spelling it all out in precise legalese. There was an attachment, a three-page photocopy of a magazine article listing the 100 top restaurants in New York.

“I'm--” she started, “--this a little hard to figure out.”

“Let me summarize if for you. What Walter left you was in effect an open-ended gift certificate for forty dinners for two, one dinner every fiscal quarter, or four times a year, for the next ten years. Once every three months or so, approximately, you can go out to dinner at any restaurant on that list. Actually, it doesn't really have to be on that list, but the idea was to give you the experience of the best restaurants in New York. So if some new restaurant opens up and it’s the hot, new, trendy spot, there's no problem if you want to pick that one, instead. And it doesn't even have to be in New York. It's open-ended, anywhere in the world. Once every three months, you and a date can go out to dinner. Get anything you want, as rich and fancy as you want, or as plain and simple, whatever. Everything will be paid for by the estate, there's a small trust fund set up to handle it. All you have to do is call my office, tell them where you want to go or where you've made reservations, and we'll take care of everything, including the gratuity. Trendy places are hard to get into. If you want to go, call them up now and make a reservation six months out. A year out. Five years out, it doesn't matter. If you want to get into the top restaurant in Paris on New Year's Eve ten years from now, go ahead and make the call and get on their reservation list.”

“I don't know what to say.”

Kennicott shrugged. “Not much _to_ say. Just sign the receipt, and the bequest is all yours. I'm assuming there's some sort of backstory to all this. I know you and Walter had dinner at the Monty Friday night. Jules LeClos called me on that Monday morning, after he'd learned Walter had died.”

“Yes, we did. And we had a conversation about it. I asked him how often one could eat out at such a fancy restaurant without becoming jaded.”

“What did he say?”

She choked up a bit, and when she'd gotten control of her voice, she said, “He said he'd get back to me on that.”

Kennicott laughed gently. “Well, I guess he did.”

“Yes, so it would seem.”

The 21st century Chicago lawyer’s version of a biblical burnt offering, the highest sacrifice to the gods there ever was: Waygu, Peekytoe, sushi, pate de fois gras, truffles, whatever was at the top of the culinary pyramid that year, whatever she wanted. No restrictions. The best. There was a song in there somewhere. And what was returned? Moses got a barren wasteland, Walter got a Nathan’s hot dog. Like people, deities have issues.

“There's one other thing I need to give you,” Kennicott said. “When they took Walter to the medical examiner’s office for the autopsy, they of course collected his personal effects, and as the executor of his estate they eventually came to me. His wallet, keys, his wristwatch, the luggage had had in his hotel room, that sort of thing. They go to his children. But among his effects was an envelope.” Kennicott reached into his coat inner pocket and pulled it out. It was a business envelope like the other one he’d given her, but with the logo of Walter’s hotel on it. He handed it to her. On the outside of the envelope someone had written “Karen/Sunday.”

“That's Walter's handwriting,” Kennicott said. “I'm giving it to you because I believe that's what Walter intended.”

She opened the envelope. In it were six one-thousand-dollar bills. Her fee for Sunday would have been four thousand ... and then the possibility of a bonus, a gratuity, for ... for what? For talk. For being honest. For telling him what he wanted to know. For taking him to the top of Mount Nebo and showing him the future, the Land of Milk and Honey.

“I can't take this,” she said. “I ... we didn't ... there was no date on Sunday. I didn't earn it.”

“No, there wasn't a date. But before you decide, see what else is in the envelope.”

She took out the six bills and put them on the table, then took out a sheet of paper folded in thirds, and she opened it. It was hotel stationary, and on it were handwritten notes, a kind of timetable. He'd written out his plan for the day.

“He was a lawyer to his dying day,” Kennicott said, knowing what was on the paper.

“Break. lox bags coffee bar xstreet 8:30-9:30,” she read out loud. "Xstreet?"

"Across the street."

“Oh. Right. Taxi Pier 83, 10-noon. Circle-Line.” This indicated a sightseeing tour on one of the Circle-Line's ships around Manhattan. He already had the tickets, two of them. Walter and his sea voyages.

“Lunch 12:30 Pulliam's Tavern.” This was an open-air bistro in Greenwich Village.

“W&T. I don't know what W&T means,” she said.

“Walk and talk. I assume you were going to stroll through Greenwich Village, SoHo, Washington Square, Central Park, whatever. Walk and talk.”

“We did the Village on Saturday,” she said. “Hotel 3:45-4:30.” Presumably to change and get ready for dinner, because the next item was:

“Tramintino's 5-7.” This was one of the top Italian restaurants in the Theater District, expensive, romantic, small, intimate, and hard to get a reservation. It looked like Walter was going for the Early Bird Specials at that hour, which might have made it easier to get in.

But no, it wasn't the early bird Walter had wanted to catch, it was Jean Valjean. In the envelope were two tickets to _Les Miserables_. Orchestra seats, fifth row. He was taking her to see _Les Miz_ , and they had to dine early.

“Sunday in New York,” she whispered.

“I’m sorry?” Kennicott asked, not having heard her clearly.

She looked up, smiling sadly. “He had this thing. It was on his bucket list. Sunday in New York. It was a movie, back in the day, and there was also a song, _Autumn in New York_ , everybody covered it back then, Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday, so he said. Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong had a duet. He said his favorite was--”

“--Arthur Prysock,” Kennicott said.

“Right. Arthur Prysock. I never heard of Arthur Prysock.”

“He had a nice, deep baritone, a little growly,” Kennicott said. “When Walter’s voice got hoarse, he made a joke that now he could really sound more like Arthur Prysock.”

“But it was more than just that song,” Karen said. “It was an idea, a … what would you call it? An idyllic vision. He said for some people it might be a beach in Tahiti, or the Left Bank in Paris, some totally romantic perfect day that anyone could ever have. For him it was these two people, two lovers. I asked him if they were married, and he said it didn’t matter. But I think they weren't married. It involved sleeping in late, making love Sunday morning, and then reading the New York _Times_ , then an intimate lunch in a cafe somewhere, and a walk through Central Park, arm in arm, him with this gloriously beautiful, desirable woman. It would be this unimaginably perfect autumn day, with the sunlight and the air unseasonably warm. The light. He talked about the quality of the sunlight, and the smell of the falling autumn leaves, which were turning color. Feeding the pigeons. Watching kids at the boat basin. Lying on the grass, his head on her lap as she read from a book of poems or something. Then dinner, a small, intimate café, a place they each thought of as their own. Candlelight, and an old waiter who knew them both by name, and looked on them fondly. Walter was big on how the light should be.

“See, he knew it was some Hollywood movie dream cliché he had, but he didn’t care about it being a cliché. He didn’t care what people might think about it. It was just something he said he’d always wanted to experience, because he said he’d never had it, that one perfect, perfect day. Sunday in New York.”

"I'm very sorry he didn't get to have it, that Sunday in New York," Kennicott said.

"I am, too. But he – we – did get to have maybe the next best thing, Saturday in New York."

"In Walter's world, what is it you do on Saturday in New York that you don't do on Sunday?"

"On Saturday you take a ride on the Staten Island Ferry--"

"You're kidding."

"I am not." She laughed. “Over and back, a round trip. He loved it. Mostly we sat on the upper deck, drinking our coffee and talking. He said he’d seen the ferry in lots of movies, and he always wanted to ride on it. So we did. And then if you're Walter you visit Washington Square Park. He said it was holy ground. And then you have a pastrami and Swiss at Katz's deli, then you visit a secret women's shelter to drop off blintzes and cheesecake--”

“He did that? He took you to the shelter?”

“He did. We took them lunch. He swore me to secrecy, of course.” She made a crossing gesture over her heart. “Then we spent the rest of the afternoon walking and talking until it was time for dinner.”

“So where did he take you? It's pretty tough to top the Monty.”

“That's what I thought, too. But Walter threw me a curve ball. He let me decide.”

“No kidding? So where did you go?”

“If I tell you, you won't believe me.”

Kennicott chuckled. “I bet this is going to be good. Okay, tell me.”

“Coney Island. Nathan's hotdogs, two rides on the Ferris wheel. An ice cream cone and a walk on the boardwalk, then a sedate taxi ride home.”

“You know, somehow I'm not surprised.”

"I have another question for you. Did he have a nice funeral?"

"He did, but it wasn't a funeral, just a bang-up memorial service. Maybe I should have mentioned it earlier. There was a tremendous turnout. Everybody in the firm, of course, and literally hundreds of people from the legal community from all over the state. A lot of judges, of course. A lot of big shot clients, in person, they didn't just send somebody. Politicians, city and state. He nearly shut down the court system and government of Illinois for half a day."

She smiled. "He would have liked that," she said. "Not his ego, I don't mean that. But shutting down the state for half a day. He'd have thought that was a worthwhile thing. Giving them the afternoon off."

Kennicott laughed, too. "Yes, he probably would."

"I bet there were a ton of flowers. Was he buried next to Ellie?" But the second the words passed her lips she knew she was wrong.

"I don't think I told you. One of Walter's requests in his will was to donate his body to science, and he was a registered organ donor. He liked to joke he was a big believer in recycling, he wanted his body recycled as much as possible, donate his heart, kidneys, retinas, whatever anyone needed and could use. So we didn't ship the body back to Illinois. He told me, wherever he dies, just donate the body to the nearest organ bank and teaching hospital that can find some use for it. I signed off on the paperwork and faxed it to the New York City organ bank organization."

Of course, Karen thought. Of course. His people back home don't know where he is buried, and some parts of him were possibly never buried at all. Not even his best friend, Aaron Kennicott, knew; he'd just signed off on the paper. All anyone in Illinois was that Walter went away for a few days and now was never coming back. Kennicott could tell them about the aneurysm, but that was all. They won't know he ate a Nathan's hot dog at Coney Island and rode a giant Ferris wheel from the top of which he'd seen the Promised Land, such as it was. They wouldn't know he might have saved the life of a dying nine-year-old with a congenital cardiac defect, and or that a kidney might have gone to an end-stage renal failure case on the fourth year of a donor waiting list. Walter had liked to work under the radar.

She held her glass up. "To Walter," she said. Her voice was choked.

Kennicott picked up his glass, tapped its rim against her glass. "To Walter."

She took the last sip of her Drambuie and set her glass down. “Thank you for the drink and for the conversation, Mr. Kennicott, and thank you for delivering my inheritance. What I mean is, thank you for doing it in person. That was very kind of you.”

“Walter would have wanted it that way.”

“I know he would.” She stood and he stood, too. They shook hands and smiled. “Goodbye,” she said. "Have a safe trip home." Then she walked away.

Kennicott signaled to the waiter to bring him another martini, and he watched Karen Preston walk out of the dark, wood-paneled bar. No wonder Walter had liked her so much. She was certainly attractive, a beautiful woman, elegant in an understated way, classy and intelligent. He wondered, idly, if she gave good head.


End file.
